Couture TO DIE FOR---kids it gets NO BETTER than this

Beijing-based couturier extraordinairie Guo Pei has been getting a little bit of press lately and with very good reason. Her designs are simply stunning beyond words. These are from her latest collection, titled "The Arabian 1002nd Night."

Cathy Horyn of the New York Times profiled her the other day:
"Four years ago, she began making collections that were on a scale that equaled, and in some cases surpassed, the technical feats of Paris couture — skirts of fantastic dimension, molded into bell shapes, or cones that rippled like the surface of a shell. Some dresses are inspired by children’s clothes, and on adults the proportions look extreme, an effect she heightens with ridiculously high platform sandals."

 "The clothes are also lavishly embellished. Next to her dresses, the most elaborate Paris stuff is a dim bulb — and growing weaker as European houses subtly cut back on handwork to meet rising labor costs. In China, it’s the reverse. Guo Pei says that when she went looking for people to do embroidery, in 1999, the only product in demand were the kind of slippers you’d find on Canal Street. Today she employs 300 people in a workroom two hours from Beijing. She had to train them, but it’s also true that her creative freedom is tethered to relatively cheap labor. One dress alone, made entirely of golden panels, took 50,000 hours to embroider."

So when asked what I would like to design (me, Charlie Dale) kids THIS IS IT!!!!  I would sell my soul to Satan himself to work with this creative and wonderful woman.  The clothes are beyond fashion it is ART---living, breathing, moving ART!