“A more Chinese style” is, for a certain class, both a statement of pride and a strategy of caution. Christine Tsui, a scholar at the University of Hong Kong, who often writes about the nexus of Chinese fashion and politics, noted recently that when Xi Jinping launched his anti-corruption campaign, in 2012, Western luxury brands saw a drastic reduction of their mainland sales. The nomenklatura capitalists, whose Vuitton bags and Rolex watches were suspiciously incommensurate with their official salaries, began to patronize native-born designers. This shift coincided with a government effort to alter the perception of “Made in China” as a synonym for “cheap and shoddy.” The new buzzword was “Designed in China,” and the Party encouraged its faithful to adopt “neo-Chinese dress.”

Guo’s loyalty to her country, both as a citizen and a creator, is part of her appeal to its governing élite. She has often been chosen to costume stars at state-sponsored events, like the Beijing Olympics and the New Year’s Gala, which has a television audience six times that of the Super Bowl. (This year’s gala was widely derided online for its egregious propaganda.) “My generation is the most patriotic, because during our lifetime we have seen such an increase in prosperity,” she said. “I really don’t care about ideology, or who’s in power, as long as the economy keeps growing.”

Guo’s aesthetic, one observer of Chinese fashion notes, expresses “a visually deprived nation’s pent-up longing for imperial grandeur.” Photograph by Pari Dukovic for The New Yorker Photograph by Pari Dukovic for The New Yorker

Zhu’s time was short, so she slipped behind a screen to try on a selection of samples. The first was a tailored sheath. (Mrs. Kennedy wore its prototype.) “I’d like it embroidered with my daughter’s horoscope,” she told Guo, without asking what the work would cost. “Clothes aren’t a major budget item for me,” she said lightly. The next number she tried on had the silhouette of a Victorian morning dress, with leg-o’-mutton sleeves and a prim collar. “We’ll jewel the cummerbund,” Guo told her, and she knelt at Zhu’s feet to sketch a design directly on the muslin. Old colleagues told me that Guo’s “people skills” have been crucial to her success. There is no servility to her manners in the studio, yet she treats her clients with a warmth that conveys the impression they are part of the family. “My mother also did beautiful embroidery,” Zhu told me wistfully as she was leaving, in a cloud of scent and fur. “She made our clothes of cast-away scraps.”

Homemade clothes were the norm in China during Guo Pei’s childhood; her mother, like millions of other women, sewed for her family. Guo was precociously dexterous. She could thread a needle by the age of two, and since her mother had bad eyesight she was proud to be useful. “That’s where my ambition came from,” she said. “I wanted to be a tailor, to support my mother when she couldn’t see.” Her childhood coincided with the Cultural Revolution, which she doesn’t remember, except that her family had enough to eat and that both parents earned a salary, “so we didn’t feel poor.” But life in Beijing was constrained and monochrome; paranoia ran high, as citizens were encouraged to inform on their neighbors, or even on their parents, if they saw any seditious behavior.

Guo was lucky that no one overheard her bedtime stories. Her mother’s mother, who lived with them, was born in the twilight of the Qing dynasty. Her prosperous family had lost its wealth before the Communists came to power, but the Empress Dowager Cixi—whose passion for Peking opera shaped her epoch’s florid style—was a mythic figure to her. “My grandmother taught me about elegance,” Guo said. “She was my first teacher. Every night when I was four or five, she described the dresses that women wore in the old days, and I pictured them before I fell asleep.”

If Guo’s mother inherited any precious keepsakes, she destroyed them. (The self-styled prince at the Pierre told me that he got started as a collector by scavenging objects that families were frantic to get rid of.) All Guo inherited was a reverence for storytelling, heirlooms, and old ladies. Her grandmother’s bound feet didn’t repel her. An upper-class woman would have been proud to hobble on her “flowerpot-sole shoes”—embroidered slippers on tall pedestals—and Guo pays homage to them in vertiginous chopines that are lashed to the ankles with satin ribbons. “I’m not a feminist,” she said emphatically. “I think women should be like water: it looks soft and tender, but it’s very powerful.”

Guo makes clothes for special male clients like the self-styled prince, but she disapproves of gender fluidity for either sex. Her father joined the Army as a young man, and during the revolution he captained a militia. In those stark years, when Mao’s wives wore Mao suits, the dandyism that the Party suppressed was invested in parades of hardware. Guo’s own taste for martial splendor complements her penchant for ornamental femininity. The inspiration for her golden dress came to her in a French war museum. “They had a portrait of Napoleon dressed for battle. Everything about his appearance—down to the buttons of his uniform—spoke of a respect for beauty, even in the face of death.”

The same could not have been said for the Chairman, who died when Guo was nine. He purged China of the “Four Olds”—ideas, culture, customs, and habits. Artisans were “reëducated,” and their skills were lost. At the Beijing Institute of Clothing Technology, I visited a costume museum that preserves a collection of antique clothing which escaped the auto-da-fé. The Han and Manchu garments make modern embroidery, even Guo’s, look coarser by comparison, like a second-generation image.

Backstage at Guo’s Paris début. Photograph by Pari Dukovic for The New Yorker Photograph by Pari Dukovic for The New Yorker

Wang Yi, an associate professor of fashion design, was my guide at the museum. In the early eighties, Wang and Guo were fellow-students at the institute, then known as Beijing No. 2 Light Industry School. “Before the revolution, all upper-class girls were educated in needlework,” she said. “They spent years on their trousseaus, and the emphasis was on finesse.” (Embroidery has a distinctive “hand,” like the brushstroke of a calligrapher, which a connoisseur can identify.) “Guo is trying to reinvent Imperial style. But there’s a gap of a century in Chinese history, and her patterns, colors, and techniques have all been improvised in a vacuum.”

The institute has an inviting shop on the ground floor—a loftlike space with raw-pine floors—that sells work by the students. Transparent bomber jackets hung on one rack; roomy linen shifts on another. You could buy a bubblegum-pink fur chubby to wear over a campy sequinned cocktail dress. There was plenty of cheek, and no chinoiserie. Wang introduced me there to Bobo Zhang, a thirty-four-year-old professor of fashion design and communication. Zhang, skinny and chic, was all in black: a turtleneck over leather jeggings. “I don’t have any interest in Guo Pei,” she said. “It’s a good thing that she trains technicians from ethnic communities, who would not otherwise be employed in industrial Chinese fashion, but there is no new style or concept to her clothes. On the other hand, foreign fashion people are curious about China, so maybe she can attract their attention, even just as a novelty.”

“Bobo represents the younger generation,” Wang pointed out. But I heard a similarly blunt assessment of Guo from Huang Hung, who publishes a life-style magazine and promotes the work of up-and-coming designers through her company and boutique, Brand New China. “Our young people are looking for a cultural identity,” she said. “Guo Pei’s notion of identity isn’t contemporary. While I can see her as a great costume designer, her clothes tend to reinforce a Western stereotype—‘The World of Suzie Wong.’ ” Huang, a robust woman of middle age who was educated at Vassar, told me that her own taste runs to Eileen Fisher. “Chinese people, like Americans, prize comfort,” she said. “We want clothes that we can move in, and that are easy to care for. The kids who work for me buy Lululemon online. You get upward mobility with Guo Pei, but not the forward kind.”