JEAN PAUL GAULTIER BLEW INTO TOWN THIS WEEK FOR A STRING OF PREVIEWS AND PARTIES AHEAD OF THE OFFICIAL PUBLIC LAUNCH OF HIS RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA TODAY. THE FAST-TALKING, THOROUGHLY LIKEABLE FRENCHMAN PROVED A WILLING PARTICIPANT IN HUNDREDS OF MEDIA EVENTS INCLUDING A PARTY IN THE LEONARD FRENCH (THERE’S AN IRONY FOR YOU) MAIN HALL AT THE GALLERY, TO WHICH MELBOURNE’S MOST EXOTIC DRAG QUEENS AND INDIVIDUALISTS SWARMED LIKE SPARKLY BEES TO A BRIMMING HONEYPOT.
AT THE END OF THIS MOMENTOUS WEEK, THE FASHION WORLD OF JEAN PAUL GAULTIER: FROM SIDEWALK TO CATWALK, FROM THE MONTREAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HAS ALREADY SEEN HUNDREDS OF MEDIA , SPONSORS AND A-LISTERS FLOOD THROUGH ITS SEVEN EXTRAORDINARY ROOMS, FROM BOUDOIR, TO URBAN JUNGLE AND FINALLY, A SPECIAL TRIBUTE TO THE DESIGNER’S SO-CALLED “MUSES” FROM AUSTRALIA. THIS IS THE NINETH CITY TO HOST THE EXHIBITION AND, BY ALL ACCOUNTS, ITS MOST BEAUTIFUL AND ALLURING INCARNATION. BEFORE THE EXHIBITION CONTINUES TO PARIS, VISITORS FROM ALL OVER AUSTRALIA ARE EXPECTED TO RETURN, TIME AND AGAIN ( AT LEAST TWICE IS USUAL) BEFORE THEY’VE HAD THEIR FILL OF THE INIMITABLE GAULTIER.
THE FOLLOWING FEATURE FIRST APPEARED IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA’S MAGAZINE GALLERY, EDITED BY GABRIELLA COSLOVICH. FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THIS MARVELLOUS EXHIBITION, INCLUDING A PROGRAMME OF ENTERTAINMENTS RUNNING EVERY FRIDAY EVENING CLICK THIS.
WORDS: JANICE BREEN BURNS
PHOTOGRAPHS: CONTRIBUTED, NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA
Jean Paul Gaultier canters down his catwalk after most shows, waving his arms, grinning, tossing kisses. He’s a joyful guy; “I love my life!” he once told this writer. He skips for joy, and relief; another collection done, another “spectacular joke” played for global headlines. At his most recent Paris Haute Couture week for example, his finale “bride” wore vampire black; huge bouncing crinoline skirt, wide red belt on trim waist, shadowy silk pleated across small peachy breasts, and full beard. Gaultier fell theatrically to his knees, reverently kissing Austrian transvestite Conchita Wurst’s gloved fingers. The spectacle, captured in the clatter of a thousand camera shutters, was slightly bizarre, perfectly right for 2014, and zoomed around the world. “Beauty can be everywhere, where we least expect it,” Gaultier explains from Paris. “For me, beauty is difference.”
So it was and always will be with Jean Paul Gaultier; fashion designer, costumier, filmmaker, author, accidental philosopher, irrepressible showman, and one of fashion’s most evocative iconoclasts. His clothing fits like jigsaw into our times and some, like art, can evoke backflips on long-held beliefs despite that the designer himself is adamant; “Non, fashion is NOT art, it is an “artisanat”, a craft”.
We agree to disagree. Gaultier wields high couture like a sculptor’s chisel or artist’s brush, subverting social conventions, poking fun at the status quo, provoking revolutions at the precise moment they’re most likely to happen. When culture alters, Gaultier is there.
Researching this article, I found commentators who argue he’s a lucky punter, sensing imminent cultural changes like the rise of androgyny, fetishism and ethnicity and cleverly exploiting them for shock value in his collections. Others reckon he’s the drum beat itself; without Madonna’s conical brassiere, post-feminist empowerment might not have happened, without his manskirts and feminised menswear, the metrosexual revolution might still be a twinkle in some gay bloke’s eye. Either way, either truth, he’s there on the future’s cutting edge, an artist as much as a craftsman, despite his denials; “We, the designers, have to feel what is going on in the society and express it through the clothes that we design,” he says. “We are in a way, a mirror of what is going on.”
One Gaultier fact can’t be argued: his collections have always crackled with challenges for conservatives and bigots. Sexual identity and orientation have always been particularly hot fodder for creative Gaultier mischief. Before Conchita Wurst’s gobsmacking finale as his manly femme, for example, Australian model Andreja Pejic, the former Andrej Pejic before gender reassignment surgery, was Gaultier’s most recent “femiman” muse. Pejic was and is a lissome, creamy-skinned blonde, head-turningly lovely and deliciously puzzling because, as Gaultier knews, and knew that we knew before Andrej became Andreja, somewhere under that slinky, curve-skimming gown or that Barbarella-esque bodysuit sculpted to flatter those long, slender legs, was a penis.
Gaultier is renowned for playing tricks of couture that mess with rigid assumptions and remind us, among myriad other revelations, that there’s a little bit of girl in every boy, and a bit of boy in every girl. Liberalism is in his DNA. “His vision of society is open-minded, his attitude to fashion always inclusive,” says Roger Leong, the NGV’s senior curator, international fashion and textiles. “He has an irreverent post-modern perspective, but an innately Parisienne sense of chic.”
Gaultier thanks his family of strong women for the way he is, particularly a loving grandmother who took him, age 12, to see Falbalas, an intense, romantic film about French haute couture that instantly fixed his co-ordinates for life. “It was exactly what I wanted to do.” By 18, he had a thick sheaf of sketches, and a teddy he’d dressed in an odd conical brassiere of his own childish design, to show for his first decade of fiddling with fashion. It was 1970. He posted his best doodles off to one Pierre Cardin and was immediately put on the legend’s payroll. A year later, this untrained son of an accountant had left a brief stint with couturier Jacques Esterel (incidentally, designer of a men’s kilt-bottomed business suit that went up like a lead balloon in the menswear market of 1966) and was mastering the ancient crafts of Parisienne haute couture at the atelier of yet another legend, Jean Patou.
Actually, mastering, and worshipping. Gaultier’s love of these sly techniques of French “high sewing” was fervent. Haute Couture week would become his Nirvana and his seven-storey Paris atelier, a hive of haute couture’s “petit mans” or “little hands”; embroiderers, milliners, featherworkers, jewellers, lace and shoemakers.
Gaultier is one of only 15 designers in the world, qualified by the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture to show their collections in Paris. What he learned at Patou in the early 1970s, has underpinned everything he later created, from the maddest, most shocking bum-baring leather fetish sling suit, to the lushest ball gown.
By 1975, Gaultier had returned to Cardin to design US-destined collections from Malaysia but was champing to mash everything he knew about couture into a vehicle for his own passions and politics. In 1976 his eponymous brand launched at the Palais de la Decourverte with a collection so exuberant, so accurately plugged into the mood of fashionable young strutters in the clubs of post-punk London and Paris, so shot-through with the chic of classic French couture, that his nickname “enfant terrible” was immediately pinned and forever stuck.
For the next 38 years, Gaultier cheerfully bullied orthodox ideas of masculinity, femininity, sex, ethnicity, religion, beauty and identity into catwalk shows and seasonal collections of gorgeous alternative “arguments”. He peppered his catwalks with anti-fashionable models; the curvy, the elderly, the ugly, the ordinary, but always mixing in enough orthodox beauties – young, slim, lovely – to ensure his visual feast also chimed with elite fashion’s lofty standards. He engaged battalions of celebrity muses to play in his “spectacular jokes” on the catwalk, including Aussies Kylie Minogue (“The nicest person I have ever met.”), Nicole Kidman (represented with Lauren Bacall, Bridget Bardot et. al., among his haute couture film legend collection of 2010), and top models Alexandre Agostin, Gemma Ward, Catherine McNeil, Andrej Pejic.
Every celebrity, every shock and catwalk treat was presented ripe for its cultural time. Conchita Wurst and Andrej Pejic for example, were as right for his recent shows as Naomi Campbell’s nude bodysuit with its strategic sequin sprinkles was right for 1983. His “Chic Rabbis” homage to Hasidic Jews was perfectly calibrated for the cultural times of 1993 and “Mongole”, his exotic blend of androgyny and ethnicity, for the mood in 1994. In 2011, when he lead Beth Ditto, the eye-poppingly curvy lead singer of punk band Gossip onto his catwalk, his audience was right to go wild for her too.
The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier – From the sidewalk to the catwalk, bristles with the markers and relics of these “socio-sartorial” revolutions: a laced corset here, a torpedo brassiere there, a jacket cut and tailored to enhance a man’s physique, a Breton-striped sailor top for girls who like to swagger, a leather bodysuit moulded to grip breasts and ribs and hips for girls who prefer a little fetish with their va-va-voom. Exhibits can be “read” like the little chapters of a modern history book. The book of Gaultierevolutions.
Roger Leong says Gaultier’s liberation of the corset is one of the most potent gestures of his career. “He took a garment associated for over a century with female oppression,” Leong says admiringly, “And turned it into an instrument of affirmation and femininity and female power.” Of course, corsets had also enjoyed a 20th century revival as fetish lingerie worn by women for men. But, Gaultier’s versions, particularly those incorporating the cartoonish conical brassieres he’d experimented with since 1983, confused that “male gaze” and reversed the gendered power play. “See how the bust pokes through the jacket,” he observed in 1990 about Madonna’s shapely, tailored trouser suit. Its torpedo breast extensions jutted between its lapels, “It is power and sensuality combined!” The costume was one of several he designed for her Blonde Ambition tour that year.
Later, the “power and sensuality” of those supra-feminine symbols was seen up close and personal by the thousands of post-feminist young women with tickets to her concerts. A paperstorm of undergraduate essays, Masters and PhD thesis’ whipped up in their wake. Madonna’s message via Gaultier, may not have triggered a pandemic of pointy brassieres, but its feminine, male-gaze-rejecting powr was absorbed by a generation, and still resonates today.
Since 1976, Gaultier has taken a few cracks at rigid definitions of masculinity too, with mixed success. “He was one of the first to be so open about his own sexuality (he is openly gay) and use that as a kind of activism in his designs,” says Leong. “He also mixed up gender in that very post modern, creative way and turned the male gaze completely around, back onto men.” Gaultier’s androgyny is part of his creative signature, but in reality, has proved a unilateral concept. While women embraced his tailored jackets, trousers and flysuits with their vampish, clenched waist, va-voom hips and broad shoulders, blokes have always been wary of his frilled, flounced or feminised ringmasters, pirate boys and especially, manskirts. Gaultier’s liberal agenda for blokes is clear but his audience stubbornly resistant. Except for a slight loosening in the 1990s when a smattering of sarongs (for holidays) appeared and Metrosexual Man arrived with his gym-pass and skin-care regime, feminised menswear has mostly floundered.
“When I did my first men’s collection I called it “L’homme objet” (toy boy or man) because I wanted to show that men can also be fragile and have their feminine side,” Gaultier explains now. “I grew up around women and found them stronger and more intelligent than men so I was upset that women were somehow stupid and that they should “be beautiful and shut up”. I thought that it was a great injustice and I always wanted to show strong women and that men could also be objects (of desire).”
In 1983, Gaultier’s first “manskirt”, technically an exquisitely cut pair of trousers with a long flap buttoned sarong-style across the front, whipped up popular fascination but comparatively few sales. At the time, he tried to explain how manskirts were about the natural intersection of masculinity with femininity, not a cross-over. “I’m not saying men and women should look alike,” he pleaded, “They’ll share the same wardrobe, but they’ll wear it differently; men will stay masculine and women feminine.”
It was no use. For 30 years Gaultier and a bandwagon of designing peers continued to salt their collections with manskirts and skirt-like garments – Vivienne Westwood, Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, Giorgio Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, many others – but blokes haven’t budged for reasons that appear set in cultural concrete. “For many men, (the manskirt’s) feminine connotations are too potent to overcome the fear that by wearing a skirt, their gender identity might be brought into question,” wrote Andrew Bolton, curator, New York Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in his 2003 history, Men in Skirts (V&A Publications). “Men’s roles in society as well as society’s definitions of masculinity need to change before skirts become an acceptable alternative to trousers.”
Gaultier remembers his first manskirt design was prompted by a male model – “Quite a ladies’ man,” he says – wearing a sarong to his fitting in 1983. “I understood that the time was right to put men in skirts,” he says, “ That they were ready for it.”
They weren’t, but now he shrugs, not bothered; “I suppose that the conventions are still very strong and how men see themselves hasn’t really changed.” There’s a footnote however, and perhaps a whole new chapter in the tale of Gaultier’s legendary manskirt. Recently, celebrities including Kanye West, Vin Diesel, Diddy, Jared Leto and teen hearthrobs Wil Smith, Justin Beiber and Ashton Mahone have been photographed, nonchalently rocking kilts, sarongs, skirt-like garments and yes, definitely, manskirts.
This Gaultierevolution may still crack its cultural concrete and have it’s day.
Janice Breen Burns, jbb@voxfrock.com.au
