Snow Xue Gao (Q9173)
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Snow Xue Gao is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Snow Xue Gao |
Snow Xue Gao is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Snow Xue Gao returned to what she does best after a few seasons of experimentation. This includes effortless girlish floral dresses and light blazers, which first put the designer on the 2018 LVMH Prize short list.But the brand has evolved from just making tailored suit blazers, and instead now wants to focus on tweed jackets after finding success with wool coats the past fall season and “soft-launching the tweed blazer design with some customers,” said Gao. “The feedback has been great, and this season we decided to spend much time developing more tweed.” The time spent paid off, resulting in New York–made tweed blazers that come in soft and romantic pastel colors that will pair well with the brand’s signature dresses.
6 September 2024
As a small business located right at the intersection of Nolita and the Lower East Side, Snow Xue Gao holds one of the most covetable retail spots downtown. Not only are hundreds of people passing by her store every day, she’s next to Supreme, with its endless parade of hypebeasts stopping to take photos in front of its iconic graffitied wall. But unlike the slew of streetwear brands and small boutiques that make up the radius of the area, Gao’s customer base is a bit more niche. Perhaps that’s why the designer seemingly decided to take some inspiration from her neighbors this season.For Gao, this meant starting with a base of the classic New York uniform: wool coat, sneakers, and Yankees hat, and adding touches of the Snow Xue Gao DNA, like colorful floral blouses and plaid prints. Unfortunately, this risky move, taking a ride to the streetwear side, resulted in a look that often felt overwhelming and mismatched.
10 February 2024
It’s the first anniversary of Snow Xue Gao’s Lower East Side store, and she now considers herself an expert in how the LES girl dresses. “In the Lower East Side, people treat every day like a special event. They like short skirts, but they also love prints, and the way everyone dresses expresses freedom in a way,” said Gao. And if you’re following the “how to dress like a LES girl” trend on TikTok, you’ll find that a few of the styles from Gao’s look book match the aesthetic, like the pleated corset tops and vintage-looking slip skirts.But even though Gao is trying to target young Gen Z customers with her latest offering, she’s still keeping her original customers in mind. Her floral-print silk maxidresses, which have been a signature in her collection since the beginning, remain an integral part of her collection this season. Layerable pieces like tweed jackets come in many colors to match every print, and Gao’s new bag line, made of vegan leather, features a range of prints to coordinate with her outfits.
7 September 2023
Photos of Lana Del Ray in her “Born to Die” era, protests from the feminist movement, and retro ’60s florals were pinned to Snow Xue Gao’s fall 2023 mood board. Having been inspired by a photo of leggy young Brits walking around with signs that said “Mini Skirts Forever” outside the Christian Dior show in 1966, Gao decided her fall 2023 collection would channel the dawning of the women’s rights movement. Skirts and dresses in an array of prints, from florals to punk-ish checks and plaids, all came in a variety of above-the-knee hemlines, while masculine wool coats and blazers complemented each look. To further counterbalance the femininity of the looks, each outfit was paired with Doc Martens, fitting shoes for stomping around at protests.“I was doing a lot of research on the feminist movement in the ’60s. The women were yelling on the streets but at the same time were so dressed up, and I was really inspired by the attitude of that period,” said Gao. Why is the mini trending again? Maybe because what we need now more than ever is more female empowerment.
11 February 2023
“I’m really inspired by the neighborhood and the people on the Lower East Side, in SoHo and Chinatown. I’m at the store often and I can always talk and get feedback from the customers,” said Snow Xue Gao. “This really is a collection for our neighbors.” The front row of her first show after the pandemic was filled with a mix of influencers and VIP customers in chokers, neon blazers, and platform heels. The presentation was held at the newly opened flagship on Bowery, located right in between Chinatown and SoHo. “This season we focused on the people who we found interesting. We invited a lot of customers who purchased the clothes and really just enjoy and love the brand and aesthetic,” said Gao.The clothes included asymmetrical hemlines on silk and cotton poplin dresses, and corset tops in custom made Snow Xue Gao fabrics. The designer tried to focus on traditional Asian silhouettes and patterns, but with a modern touch to make them more down-to-earth and wearable for the women in downtown New York. Because of the time Gao spends in her store, she has learned that she’s dressing several generations: “Younger girls will come in to get crop tops, and their moms will get the dresses.”
14 September 2022
Snow Xue Gao’s five-year-old brand thrives on the polarity of its designer’s aesthetic interests—deconstructed tailoring and bold floral prints are sure to feature heavily each season, often spliced together in arresting combinations—but also the balance between her dual identity as a Beijing-born designer working in New York. It’s the latter subject that proved especially important to Gao this season, who has felt a particular pull to her hometown in recent weeks (due to COVID travel restrictions, she hasn’t been back since 2020) thanks to both the Lunar New Year celebrations and the beginning of the Winter Olympics.“I’ve been in New York for eight or nine years, but this year’s Chinese New Year you could feel the energy more than ever,” said Gao. As usual, the designer channeled the various flora of her homeland—peonies, orchids, Chinese roses—into kaleidoscopic prints that were here set against plaids and houndstooth checks rather than her typical counterbalance of monochromatic suiting materials. (Gao noted that she wanted to emphasize a contemporary, wearable silhouette this time around, rather than anything too fussy.) She compares the sense of duality she instills in her designs to seeing the Empire State Building lit up in red in recent weeks to celebrate the Year of the Tiger. “It’s very inspiring to me,” she said. “The Asian influence within that contemporary shape and sense of modernity.”When it came to the clothes, Gao experimented with a range of new fabrics and techniques this season, including of-the-moment mesh tops printed with florals abstracted to become almost psychedelic, and a particularly charming design that featured hand-painted horses. One striking piece came with some techy know-how that echoed an ancient art form, in a neat summation of Gao’s willingness to bridge two worlds: namely a wool coat that had been digitally printed to create bold black-and-white stripes intended to echo the strokes of Chinese calligraphy and ink-wash painting. There was plenty here to charm Gao’s increasingly global customers, plus a heartfelt message of pride in her roots too.
11 February 2022
It’s still early to shake out the themes of the spring 2022 season, but family is a subject that keeps coming up. Maybe lockdown created opportunities to spend more time with loved ones—or old picture albums. Whatever the reason, grandmothers and aunts seem to be the personal muses of the moment.Snow Xue Gao grew up in Beijing, where she spent many happy hours in her grandmother’s garden; that little Eden inspired the pretty peony print the designer developed this season. “The peony is the national flower of China, it represents family, joy, and happiness,” she explained. Its cheeriest iteration was on a cotton coat, light as a petal. Other looks aspired to the same state, but read more as flimsy.Tailoring is Gao’s forte: a traditional blazer, and one that featured her signature asymmetries (one long side, one short; one structured shoulder, one dropped), both in plaid with an easy hand, were smart.The cultural movements that came to the fore during COVID seemed to have energized Gao. She took time and care with her diverse casting. One gets the sense that she is more engaged with the world, more outward looking, and more open than ever to feedback. Perhaps she spent less time listening to her fabrics: the collection felt less unified in the past; that could be because it was smaller. The tightest expression of her vision happened to be on some of the more body-close looks in the show, both gray dresses with twisted scarf drapes. These really showcased Gao’s USP, her “dual” approach to design that brings together different fabrics (masculine and feminine) and techniques (draping and tailoring) in unexpected, exciting ways.
9 September 2021
Two main themes of the pandemic—time for reflection and a collective Netflix addiction—are at play in Snow Xue Gao’s fall collection.Bridgertoninspired both the square necklines seen on princess-line corset tops and the designer’s research into 19th-century dress. “It’s interesting to see that no matter what time period, no matter which country, which region, what color, there’s always a group of women that represent strong power in a feminine way,” says Gao. And in some instances the single removable sleeve that comes with sleeveless dresses takes on the appearance of soft armor.In response to customers’ demands for more casual options, this season, dresses are offered in cotton in addition to silk, which is used to pipe the deconstructed seams of the collection’s hero pieces, reversible jackets and coats made of a luxe double-wool. These represent a necessary evolution of the designer’s dramatic half-and-half aesthetic, which would become stale if left to remain static.Adding dynamism this season is the symbol of the tiger, which was pulled, Gao says, from a Chinese children’s song, which also provided the collection’s title, Women Are Tigers. Attaining balance between the powerful and the fragile, feminine and masculine, and East and West are this designer’s main preoccupations, and they are best resolved in her skillful tailoring. The craftsmanship of an intriguing skirt made of pieced jacket parts, including a sleeve panel, somehow brings a sense of order to deconstruction.If past collections offered an overabundance of ideas and products that made it impossible to see the forest for the trees, this one has a clearer through line and a more defined palette. In taking a step back, Gao has made room for the sun to shine through with a focus on pieces that are better edited and more confident.
15 February 2021
One of the most significant changes wrought by the pandemic is the #WFH revolution, which has not only upended how and where we work, but how we dress. Sweats now count as business casual. Snow Xue Gao is one designer who has pivoted to accommodate customers’ increased desire for comfort. In fact, with the encouragement of buyers, she’s added a whole new category to her offerings: pajamas.Gao’s spring offering includes both “pajama pajama” and pajama dressing options. A blazer that’s half tailored check and half floral kimono is an example of the latter. Contributing to a loungy feeling are a variety of slip dresses, which are a welcome, more accessible addition to the lineup.Gao is a talented tailor with a distinct signature of puzzling asymmetric “dual” or half-and-half looks together that usually play softness against suiting. Though many of these pieces are adjustable, offering the possibility of customization, they are anything but subtle. Too bad, because subtlety, not showiness, is what fits this moment.Comfort is another topical subject, and Gao addresses it by adding a lounge-like ease to jackets with exposed seams. The addition of pajama separates, which could be worn with a matching jacket or just a tee for a grocery run, allows the customer to incorporate the label into an existing wardrobe rather than commit to a full look.Gao succeeded in creating a pared-down look for her collection for spring. It was a personal one too. Look five is a fairly straightforward translation of process, reflecting how Gao stood in front of a mirror in a slip dress and held lengths of fabric up against it. Another way Gao made things more “soft and casual” was to make slip-on designs rather than ones that require lots of zipping and buttoning.The designer said she wanted to make a collection that created happiness, expressed ease, and responded to people’s needs, and she was successful in doing so. However, Gao might consider streamlining her look book, as she did her garments this season, to more clearly and strongly communicate her message and the season’s newness.
14 September 2020
Buy less and buy better is fashion’s mantra of the moment. That’s a boon for Snow Xue Gao, because her clothes will deliver a lot of bang for the buck this fall. Glance casually at the lookbook and you might think that Gao is working much in the same vein as last season, or that she’s perhaps too attached to half-and-half dressing. (What Lynn Yaeger dubbed the “Frankenstein dress” peaked in 2018.) What was a passing trend elsewhere, though, is a signature look for Gao, and one that speaks to her brand’s core dichotomies: East/West; masculine/feminine; tailoring/prints.Building on her “double take” look from spring, Gao created a similar visual effect, but did so with two-in-one-outfits (and some reversible looks) that the customer can adapt to her fancy. Take Look 39, a man-tailored coat with what appears to be a bow-tied floral inset—it’s detachable. Even without the panel, this is no traditional coat but one with purposeful asymmetries; note the single lapel and half collar. The inspiration behind these two-in-one pieces is China’s Silk Road, where travelers adapted to warm days and cold nights by adding and subtracting layers.Qing dynasty ceramics was the starting point for this season’s floral prints, to which the designer added her logo, which seemed superfluous because Gao’s work, though busy, is distinctive. Construction is what gives her output such a strong visual identity. There is a rigor to her tailoring that makes her attempts at easy sportiness (the jersey knit pieces) feel wrong and her deconstructions (like the inside-out jackets) feel right.
8 February 2020