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Jean Paul Gaultier
Jean‐Baptiste Mondino
© Jean‐Baptiste Mondino
Jean Paul Gaultier has been described as the “enfant terrible” of high fashion – with his haute couture take on street culture and iconoclastic styles, his provocative media profile and his notoriety as the costume designer responsible for the corset-clad Madonna for her 1990 “Blond Ambition World Tour”. But there is much more than the media-saturated eye perceives. A recent survey of Gaultier’s oeuvre opened up at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts entitled “The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk”, which sets the stage for the public-at-large to intimately encounter his work and discover the sumptuous craft of this sartorial master.
Re-invented Iconographies: Gaultier is known for his use of recognizable iconographies whose identities he has re-worked and transformed over the course of his 40 year career as a designer. During this time, he has taken classic, seductive, French staples of “everyday” fashion – from the trench coat, the “marinière” (classic sailor’s blue and white stripped top) to the peach lingerie corset – and extended these garments to the realm of haute couture through careful craft, stylistic re-invention and a generous infusion of luxury fabrics and fabrication.
Let’s take a few enduring examples which the designer has reworked over the course of his career. The trench coat at the hands of Gaultier has gone through significant permutations from the simple proletarian soldier’s rain jacket to one-of-a-kind full-length form-fitting evening gown as worn by Kristen McMenamy for his Fall-Winter 1991-1992 pret-à-porter “French cancan” collection. Here we witness the iconic cut and fabric of the trench coat adjusted and re-engineered to become the sole layer of clothing covering the body, a provocative move which flirts with the inherent perversion of wearing “nothing” but a trench coat. The “marinère” also undergoes a sartorial transformation from sailor top to overt sexiness such when the back is cut out in men’s shirts to reveal their torso for Gaultier’s “Homme-objet” collection in 1984. The stripped top is also covered in plumes and converted into a full-length evening dress for his Spring-Summer 2000 haute couture “Les Indes galantes” collection. Meanwhile, the corset, certainly his most renown icon, is subject to innumerable remodelings from basic body-shaping lingerie to sexy exterior tops as seen as recently as in the Spring-Summer 2010 pret-à-porter collection “Bad-Girls-Point-G”, to a full back-laced corset dress as modeled by the very young burlesque star Ditta Von Teese for his Spring-Summer pret-à-porter “Le Dadaïsme” collection in 1983. The inventiveness of the designer can be seen in these continuous structural alterations wherein the foundational pattern gets reworked again and again over the series of many collections. This reconfiguration of standardized forms and classic designs can also be seen as an allegory for the modalities under which the fashion system operates, seasonally re-inventing itself through slight alternations of detail, length or cut. Hence, far from a “one trick pony”, Gaultier is revealed to be an adventurous inventor of structures, exploring inlaid possibilities in garments as-of-yet imagined in the cannon of fashion.
Unconventional Beauties: Gaultier is not only an architect of structures but also a social iconoclast, remaining truly ahead of the curve through his breaking down of fashion and cultural taboos. Known for holding open calls to recruit “atypical beauties” for his runway shows, Gaultier has promoted over the years models from all walks of life, cultures, shapes and ages. His Fall-Winter 1997-1998 prêt-à-porter “La Culture noire et sa force” fashion show went as far as to feature 24 black models to one white, a net inversion of the fashion race ratio still favored today. The designer frequently uses “unconventional beauties” from oversized models such as Beth Ditto who walked his runway for the Spring-Summer 2011 prêt-à-porter “Rock’N’Romantic” collection, to his ironic use of senior citizen models for his Jean Paul Gaultier “Junior” add campaign in 1987, to his tattooed and body-pierced models chosen for his Spring-Summer 1994 prêt-à-porter “Les Tatouages” collection, or simply via his continuous inclusion of atypical and multicultural models. Strict gender categories and prejudices are also contested in Gaultier’s designs as he advocates for a cross-gender androgyny applied to both men and women. Feminized couture for men such as the man-skirts showcased in his Spring-Summer 1985 “Et Dieu créa L’Homme” collection and women’s tailored suits featured over his many collections are a testimony to his desire to blur categories and expectations. The designer is clearly a pusher of boundaries, a contester of stereotypes and a promoter of difference, change, and tolerance. Yet, he is never vulgar. Instead he is genuinely playful– always surprising and consistently stylistically contemporary. One of the first openly homosexual designers of a French haute couture house (in an era when Yves Saint-Laurent never revealed such details) Gaultier has never hidden his desire for a leveling of bourgeois conventions of age, culture, and sexual orientation and it remains impressive that he has succeeded in doing so from the highest echelons of fashion while creating some of the most coveted garments of the past four decades.
From Low to High: It is no surprise, due to Gaultier’s underlying political stance, that he has been inspired by trends outside of the couture houses such as street dress and non-western cultures. One of his first collections Fall-Winter 1989-90 prêt-à-porter “Femmes entre elles” collection was heavily inspired by the punk movement in the UK and featured zippered dresses, which he recently re-visited in his latest Fall-Winter 2010-2011 haute couture “Les Parisiennes” in a luxuriously punk-themed collection. However, these have never been disenfranchised Camden punks’ frocks. The technical virtuosity of these garments – from hand sewn sequins and bespoke tailoring – does more than travesty the original anarchistic message but instead aims to infuse the upper echelons of society with revolt, change, and an aesthetic and political kinship with the “street”. Gaultier’s couture-punk, read in an optimistic light which it must, is a positive social force. Much more than a colonization of populist trends at the servitude of commerce, it is a social, political and economic unifying force.
Gaultier has created over the years a number of mythical world-inspired collections. Of these many we can count his Spring-Summer 2004 haute couture “Les Samuraïs” which borrowed from Japanese motifs, Spring-Summer 2005 haute couture “Hommage à l’Afrique” which re-mixed tribal textures, the Fall-Winter 2005-2006 haute couture “Hommage à l’Ukraine et à la Russie” which had Eastern-bloc influences and materials, and finally Fall-Winter 1993-1994 prêt-à-porter “Les Rabbins chics” collection which was inspired by orthodox Jewish dress. All of these collections, and many more, re-mix recognizable world cultural motifs, while also creating signature “Gaultier” pieces which are sexy, dramatic – at times tongue-in-cheek – yet always culturally respectful while also being aesthetically transgressive. We see non-western textiles and motifs – colourful embroideries, furs, and prints – crafted by haute couture tailoring which coalesce two very different legacies into sensitive yet contemporary fashions. By using textures and aesthetics which are specifically culturally codified (such as Chinese embroidery, Russian prints, and orthodox Jewish hats) and propelling these into the realm of haute couture, it is almost as if Gaultier is saying: “Look at these traditional fashions, textiles, textures, colours – look at their beauty – they have so much in common with couture!” Far beyond cultural pastiche, his use of non-western motifs is a ploy to bring these outer worlds of high fashion into focus, and to celebrate cultural diversity as it exists on the very doorsteps of haute couture, in the multicultural neighborhood of Paris as well as every metropolis of the world.
Material Futurist: Gaultier situates himself not only within the fashion and cultural Avant-Garde, but also at the cutting edge of future-forward material uses. The influence of Pierre Cardin, know for his “space-age” collections, with whom Gaultier first apprenticed at the age of 18, is present in the designer’s unconventional use of future-forward textiles and technologies. Gaultier is one of the first to exploit latex, rubber and other synthetic materials which were normally only used in sex shops. These materials have in fact now become commonplace in main-stream fashion partly thanks to Gaultier’s material risk-taking. Digital and custom textiles printing technologies are also harnessed by the designer to aesthetic and material unconventional results. For example, Gaultier’s Fall-Winter 2009-2010 haute couture “Les Actrices” collection features a dress, “Étoiles et toiles”, which showcases a series of custom-printed film-strip images gathered and inlaid into pleats in such a way as to progressively reveal the film’s image sequences as they emerge into a full skirt. The cohesion of the many hundreds cinematic images seamlessly integrated into the structure of the dress, belies an incredibly complex design feat which is both a delight and a surprise to the eyes when observed up close. Furthermore, Gaultier’s inflatable dresses as part of the Fall-Winter 1995-1996 prêt-à-porter “Cavalières et Amazones des temps modernes” are a precursor to fashion and technology experimentations which we are seeing today with the integration of sensors, pneumatics and other shape changing technologies.
In short – Gaultier is one of us. An auto-didactic, “trained” by television and fashion magazines, he entered the echelons of high fashion as a fan and has stayed true to an anti-bourgeois ethos all-the-while making some of the most beautiful, luxurious and iconographic couture collections of this era.
The exhibition “The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier. From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk”runs at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts June 17 to October 2, 2011.
–written by Valérie Lamontagne
Valérie Lamontagne is a Montréal-based artist-designer-theorist and curator. She is the Founder and Director of 3lectromode, a design studio invested in developing wearables that combine D-I-Y technology with current fashion research. She teaches in the Department of Design & Computation Arts at Concordia University, Montréal Canada where she is completing a PhD investigating “Performativity, Materiality and Laboratory Practices in Artistic Wearables”. Her occasional blog: www.3lectromode.com/blog
[Images: Photos by Jerry Pigeon for "The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier" Exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Jean‐Baptiste Mondino]
