Andrew Ginn, the pioneering Singaporean fashion designer known for his exacting eye and uncompromising craftsmanship,

is the subject of a sweeping new retrospective at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.

Jared Bowen of G.B.H. Boston takes us there for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

To enter the house of Andrew Ginn is to find a feast of flourishes,

capes ornamented with sumptuous embroidery,

gowns sculpted into singular forms that radiate a splendor of color

rivaling any springtime garden.

Beauty has long been the fashion designer's inspiration, but he can even find it in ruins.

It was a collection inspired by a Venetian Palazzo, but not just a normal Venetian Palazzo, but a decaying Venetian Palazzo, which is sinking.

This is the designer taking stock of his decades in design before he closed shop in

2023. Over nearly 30 years in his Paris Atelier, Ginn produced 80 collections and some

10,000 ensembles. The most glam now fill galleries at the PBD Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, where a retrospective of his career is now on view.

Beauty is really the motto of my life, in my personal life, in my professional life, I really love for beauty.

Over his lengthy career, Ginn became renowned for his demi-couture, implying the rigors of

rarefied oat-couture design to clothing customized for our ready-to-wear audience.

And with material and craftsmanship, he says, that has always been uncompromising.

I would like to stress the fact that we design every single elements on our garments.

We designed the textiles, so be it printed, woven, embroidered, the buttons, the buckles.

Why is that important to you?

That is important because I'm a perfectionist. Because his focus is so much on the tradition,

it almost makes the clothes all that much more modern. Patra Slinkard curated the show,

the first to examine Gin's legacy, which itself is built on firsts. In 1997, he was the first

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