THE LEGEND HIMSELF IS FLYING IN TO OPEN THE FASHION WORLD OF JEAN PAUL GAULTIER; FROM SIDEWALK TO CATWALK, AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA ON OCTOBER 17. IN HONOR OF HIS FIRST DESCENT DOWNUNDER, WE HAVE PLUMBED THE VOXVAULT AND DUSTED OFF THIS RELIC OF EDITOR JANICE BREEN BURNS‘ LAST ENCOUNTER WITH MONSIEUR GAULTIER. IN 2010 IT WAS PUBLISHED IN THE WAKE OF LEE “ALEXANDER” MCQUEEN‘S SUICIDE, A TRAGEDY THAT NOT ONLY FUELED GRIEF, BUT QUESTIONS – AND SOME VICIOUS CRITICISM – AROUND THE VERY NATURE AND RAISON D’ETRE OF FASHION.
A QUEER thing happened after the death of fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen. On the waves of grief and shock that were tweeted, blogged and vox-popped across the world within hours of the announcement, came a thin but significant slick of such vitriol it took my breath away.
Lee “Alexander” McQueen in 2006
“So what if he’s dead? What did he ever do for mankind?” and “What’s the use of fashion anyway?”. So went the milder of many catty comments, all topped, at the end of what was a genuinely awful week for many in the industry, by London Telegraph journalist George Pitcher‘s widely circulated column. Pitcher painted the designer as a laughable prat, fashion as a preposterous farce, “a disgusting place to make a living”, and all those who pay it more than glancing attention, idiots. He and the anti-fashion blog-brigade ridiculed McQueen and fashion itself so vehemently that week, I was reminded of US Vogue editor Anna Wintour‘s more pointed observation that: “There’s something about fashion that can make people very nervous.”
Psychological theory says nerves have a habit of manifesting in annoyance or anger, and it does appear “the nervous”, including Pitcher, were more numerous and vocal on fashion’s fringes recently. Not only that, fashion, as one miffed fan tweeted after Pitcher’s vicious word salad: “Is becoming very easy to ridicule.” And so it is, provided attacks are strictly confined to its hard, shiny, puzzling surface, just as Rothkos, Pollocks, Hirsts and even Manets and Picassos can also be ridiculed on their two most vulnerable dimensions.
Later, I recalled the whole anti-fashion palaver before interviewing another designer, an older, more wily one who is also considered, as McQueen was, a master of his craft, Jean Paul Gaultier. In a philosophical discourse on his raison d’etre, this jolly genius (he laughs like a drain, derives huge enjoyment from just about anything, says at the end of our long talk, “I love my life”) veered surprisingly near to Pitcher’s fundamental premise, that fashion is irrelevant. Or is becoming so. “What is the need of fashion?” he asked, and I hoped rhetorically. “The only people who truly buy and use fashion are fashion people.”
He reflected on haute couture, the phenomenally laborious, handmade fashion produced under strict French guidelines and only in Paris even more harshly: “Clothes so far away from reality that they don’t concern the people; they are only a show, an experimental show. People look and they think ‘beautiful’ but they don’t buy the clothes.”
For Gaultier, in other words, the relevance and intrinsic worth of fashion is still linked to its functionality and public currency. “My goal is to make clothes that are worn, that are for people, not for museums.” That may ring like the bleeding obvious, but there are increasingly examples of heart-pumpingly fine fashion that suggest this is the time, and there is a need, to acknowledge something fundamental has changed and some fashion should exist for its own inscrutable sake. Pitcher and all other nervous types notwithstanding.
In his spring-summer 2010 haute couture collection, Gaultier showed a dress, if you could call it that, built up from a hard grippy corset base of cross-woven metallic ribbons that sculpted the model’s torso and breasts then swelled into a latticed pannier skirt attached low on the hips and spreading out like an exotic little orangery around the tops of her legs. At the back, a hand-span-wide strip of cross-hatched “metal” ran up like an alien spinal column from her coccyx to brain stem. And this was not the most arresting outfit in the show, merely the most arrestingly complicated and ugly/beautiful.
It was also the latest blip on Gaultier’s extraordinary evolutionary curve that, he says, was triggered the day he watched Falbalas, an elegant, romantic, black-and-white film based in the French couture house of one Marcel Rochas in the 1940s. Gaultier was 12 and watched it with his grandmother, a loving beacon in his childhood. (Some psych major somewhere, some day, should write a thesis on the impact of loving grandmothers on artists-in-the-bud.) “It was exactly exactly what I wanted to do,” Gaultier recalls.
As a revelatory reference for Gaultier’s earliest inspiration, Falbalas is unmatchable: a young couturier, racked by his creative compulsion and visions, paces and barks and worries as he lords over a classic Parisian atelier while churning out seemingly effortlessly beautiful art adaptable to the womanly form. “Like a kind of dreaming and elegance,” Gaultier says. “When I started at (Jean) Patou, it was like that. Beautiful, strong. And all the (people) beautiful, very strong.”
Gaultier, son of an accountant, was first hired, untrained, by Pierre Cardin as his assistant in 1970. Gaultier’s unsolicited sketches had persuaded the older man to experiment with the younger buck. But he was restless, as he appears perpetually to be now, and moved on. A year at Jacques Esterel, and another year at Jean Patou, followed by a year in Manila managing Cardin’s boutique, and Gaultier considered his creative foundation hardened enough to launch his first eponymous collection in 1976. “I didn’t do school to be a designer; it was by reflection and reading and because I had something to say that was different.”
Gaultier’s art evolved fast and, history records, along radical lines. “I was inspired by the street, by the life of the day.” And by the life of the more evocative night-time too, as testified by myriad academics, including RMIT‘s associate professor of fashion, Robyn Healy, who have logged and analysed his oeuvre since. “He had an incredible impact at a time that there was a lot of blurring of gender, and accentuation of gendered attributes, going on in the club culture anyway. It was [a] perfect time for Gaultier.”
In the late 1970s and 1980s, Gaultier grounded elements of his artistic style and they echo still: fetishised silhouettes of slim-hipped, broad-shouldered men, cartoonishly sleek women with an aura of “bombshell” about them. “He played across notions of outerwear and underwear, what was women’s wear, what was men’s wear,” Healy says. “He pushed and blurred them and it was quite confronting. We don’t realise just how confronting, because it’s all so mainstream now.”
Through the maligned medium of fashion, Gaultier was challenging stereotypes and, as social revolutions around sex and identity picked up speed, he fed them meal after meal of wearable and some unwearable ideas. His cartoonish corsetry, man-skirts and frocks, recurring themes of androgyny and costume drama, fetishised sailors and pirates (horizontal stripes and swashbuckling girls in any context tend to conjure up his name), military uniforms, equestrian cliches, foppish top hats, his clawed and shredded materials meticulously fashioned back into garments, even religious iconography so powerful in his earlier work, still echo in his collections today.
At haute couture time, twice a year, his creativity is spanked up to nuclear levels by the stress of compressing so many handcrafted elements into so many designs in so little time. His Paris atelier employs every specialist craftsperson he needs on site: embroiderers, milliners, glovemakers, buttons, jewellery, shoe and bag makers, even feather and crochet specialists.
Filmmaker Loic Prigent’s documentary of the final 28 hours before one of Gaultier’s spring-summer couture shows, The Day Before, is nail-biting. “It’ll give you palpitations,” says James Nolen of Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). “They die a thousand deaths before your eyes.” Nolen regularly secures rare and intriguing films for ACMI’s popular, periodic fashion series.
One of the simpler, draped silk dresses in the collection featured in The Day Before takes Gaultier’s seamstresses 180 laborious hours to create to his brief, but is scrapped “Non!” without ceremony, for not being perfect. Another, “the crocodile dress”, is nursed like a fractious infant through its metamorphosis from gnarled leather pelts to shapely armour that re-sculpts its model’s body, by a specialist embroiderer who first snips the pelt into a thousand scaley fragments, then laboriously crochets them together again into their new woman-pelt as per M. Gaultier’s instructions.
Gaultier’s themes recur, and his signature is strong and as recognisable as a Picasso or a Pollock, but every new collection is also gobsmackingly fresh, delivered with its mix of wearable and unwearable fashion art, and its shocks and tricks to lure the media.
“For the fashion show we have some spectacular jokes,” Gaultier says, and giggles. (Honestly, he giggles.) He regularly coaxes celebrity friends (he adores Kylie Minogue: “I love her, she is truly the nicest person I have ever met”) onto his catwalks, was first to mix elderly, obese and otherwise “imperfect” models into his line-up, and is particularly fond of dramatic gestures, from the simplicity of bared but embellished breasts to incorporating a fake, late-term pregnancy in rolled, quilted silk into his collection and, once, pitching a boxing ring with kicking, punching women in burlesque lingerie in the middle of his men’s wear show.
Down at ground-level reality though, Sam Hussein, buyer at Melbourne’s Cose Ipanema boutique in Collins Street, which has stocked his ready-to-wear collections for more than a decade, is both editor and conduit between him and this neck of his ultimate market. Shown photographs of the spinal dress and others from his archive, her comments come quick and confidently. “Body armour,” she says, and peers more closely at the cross-hatched silk. “He works like a sculptor. His work is all about the female form and the male form. He uses the body like a skeleton, then fills in his vision.”
She shows how Gaultier often encases his models completely. “He even covers the face.” In 2006, he constructed an entire body suit in black and white herringbone fabric, covering and so “restructuring” the model’s feet, body, face, hands, ears and hair. In 2003, he designed face jewellery diamond-studded “black eyes” and lips for models in his men’s wear collection for spring 2004. “There is a natural acceptance of Gaultier in here,” Hussein says, gesturing around the slick Cose Ipanema boutique. “He doesn’t need the massive marketing like other brands. He has earned his place. He is a genius.”
Gaultier is aware the price of his work – several thousand dollars for a single frock in any one of many fashion temples such as Cose Ipanema around the world – can cast a pall of unreality. “They are luxurious, and so expensive,” he says. “My clothes are not worn by a lot of people.” They are, however, intrinsically linked to humanity. “We are the filter of what is going on around,” Gaultier says of being a designer. “We are the things of the moment economy, sociology, ecology, spirituality. We reflect society and the aesthetic corresponds to the needs and the visions of people in our time. The clothes are some way to express. Just look.”
Yes, Mr Pitcher, and all others apparently unnerved by fashion, just look.
Janice Breen Burns, jbb@voxfrock.com.au
