Eileen Gu needs no introduction. Her ability to execute complex aerial tricks with precision and power while withstanding outrageous G-forces has made her the most decorated freeskier in Olympic history, with six medals and counting at just 23. Yet, to marvel only at her athleticism would be to miss her greatest assets: an intellect and wit that are sharper still. Her interview soundbites consistently make headlines and circulate endlessly on social media, commanding millions of views in an era of fractured attention. Armed with piercing intellect, Eileen Gu is impossible to ignore because her prowess is impossible to deny.
Joséphine Amour d’Aigrette earring, choker and bracelet in white gold with diamonds, all Chaumet. Coat and top, all Max Mara.
Joséphine Éclat Floral earring and necklace in white gold with sapphire and diamonds, all Chaumet. Dress, Iris van Herpen.
Her dominance sweeps an astounding spectrum. Besides being an unparalleled free skiing champion and Stanford graduate, she is a Fashion Week fixture, brand ambassador, and soon-to-be published author; Gu continually pushes her potential and proves that she can achieve anything she puts her mind to.
In our latest interview, she explains why constructive criticism is her ultimate love language, how she’s come to realise what empowerment in fashion means to her, and the influence of her mother.
Hong Kong Exclusive Limited Edition Coat, top, and shorts, all Max Mara.
Hong Kong Exclusive Limited Edition Coat, top, and shorts, all Max Mara.
Welcome back for your fourth shoot with Vogue Hong Kong! So much has evolved in your life and career since you first graced our pages in 2022. How does it feel to return to this familiar publication during this new chapter?
I think of publications like timestamps. The magazine changes, the styling changes, the chapter changes — I attended my graduation ceremony this year, I’ve competed at another Olympics, I’ve grown up in public in a way that is documented almost frame by frame. But the person being photographed is running the same operating system she was running in 2022, and honestly the same one she was running at age nine. I have always stood for the same things: girls and women in sports, athletics and academics coexisting rather than competing, cross-cultural exchange, fashion as a legitimate art form. So returning to Vogue Hong Kong doesn’t feel like unveiling a new person. It feels like checking a measurement at a later point in time and finding the reading consistent. The new chapter is real — the external circumstances of my life have genuinely transformed — but a chapter is a unit of narrative, and narrative is something other people impose on a life. From the inside, it has never felt like chapters. It has felt like one continuous line.
Since your first feature with us, you’ve become the most decorated freestyle skier in Olympic history and a fixture at Fashion Week. As a self-described introvert, how do you navigate the profound surge in media attention and the high-energy, public-facing demands of your career? What does decompressing look like for you?
I’ve never understood introversion as shyness. I understand it as an energy budget. Interacting with the public is an output — sometimes a joyful one, sometimes a costly one, but always an expenditure — and like any physical system, I have to balance the ledger or the whole ceiling lowers. People imagine decompressing is a luxury behaviour, bubble baths and candles. For me it is closer to maintenance. Sleep, food, exercise, solitude. If I protect those inputs, I can walk into a room of two hundred people and be fully present. If I don’t, no amount of willpower compensates, because willpower is not a source of energy, it’s an allocation of it. The other thing I would say is that the surge in attention has zero bearing on my sense of self, which makes it much cheaper to process. Attention is weather. I check it the way I check a forecast — it tells me what to wear, never who I am.
Joséphine Amour d’Aigrette earring, choker and bracelet in white gold with diamonds, all Chaumet. Top, skirt and belt, all Max Mara
Tell us about your unbreakable bond with your Mom! How have the women in your life shaped and inspired you?
My mother is not my manager, my coach, or my tiger mum — she is my co-founder. That distinction matters to me. A co-founder builds the thing alongside you and believes in it before there is any evidence it will work. She never handed me a script for my life. She built an environment where curiosity was the default setting and then trusted me to operate inside it, which is a much harder thing to do than controlling someone. My grandmother was an engineer, and from her I inherited the idea that the world is a set of systems that can be understood if you are patient and precise enough — that nothing is magic, everything has a mechanism. Between the two of them, I was raised by women who treated competence as ordinary. I never absorbed the idea that being a girl was a detractive variable in the equation at all. You cannot be limited by a ceiling you were never taught to see.
When we last spoke on the Gold Gala red carpet, you shared that you historically refused to wear pink. Does this tie into your broader exploration of the balance between the masculine and feminine? How does fashion help you express and present yourself in relation to these paradigms?
The pink refusal was real, and it was also borrowed. As a young girl in a male-dominated sport, I had absorbed an equation I never consciously chose: feminine presentation equals not being taken seriously. Refusing pink was me communicating through someone else’s filter — I was dressing for the interpretation I feared, not for myself. What changed is that I stopped accepting responsibility for other people’s paradigms. Masculine and feminine are not properties of garments; they are readings, imposed by a recipient, and the same piece of clothing will be read ten different ways by ten different people. It is not my responsibility to appear in a way that is legible or attractive to other people, but it is my wish to use fashion as an art form, and to advocate for the intersection of femininity and empowerment through it. So now I wear pink when pink is the honest choice, and I wear a suit when the suit is. The balance people ask me about was never between two aesthetics. It was between dressing for my own signal and dressing for someone else’s noise.
You’ve joked before about your unconventional love languages. Would you still say that “constructive criticism” takes the number one spot?
Still number one, and it isn’t close. Praise, in most of its forms, is low-information. It feels wonderful and tells me almost nothing I can use. Constructive criticism is the opposite: it is someone who cares about me enough to risk an uncomfortable interaction in order to hand me data. That is an expensive gift, and I have learned to price it accordingly. The people closest to me know that the fastest way to my heart is not to tell me I’m amazing — it’s to watch the run, find the flaw I missed, and tell me before anyone else does. I suppose it comes back to filters. With the public, I accept that everything I say passes through filters I cannot control. With the people I love, I want no filter at all. Just the signal, uncompressed, as fast as possible.
Photography: Alex Huanfa Cheng
Creative & Fashion Direction: Jenine Oh
Makeup Artist: Yvane Rocher @WSM
Hair Stylist: Sébastien Richard @Home Agency
Set Designer: Mathilde Valentin Dulac @8 Represent
Executive Producer: Michaël Lacomblez
Producer: Houda Bemmansour
Production: Louis 2
Digital Tech: Kang Rong
Photo Assistants: Maxence Meyer & Florent Marti
Production Assistants: Elise Joy, Ambre Sieurac, Mathilde Barniaud & Nizar Dhiab
Styling Assistants: Clara Devillet & Agnes Solhall
Editor
Karrie Lam
