The World Of Fashion

Fantasyland

Jean Paul Gaultier’s inspirations.

by Susan Orlean September 26, 2011

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/09/26/110926fa_fact_orlean#ixzz1YyuqDcve

One day, some years back, Jean Paul Gaultier was at home, feeding his cat. As he emptied a can of cat food, he was struck by how attractive the can was, and surmised that if he cut off both the bottom and the top of it what remained would bear an intriguing resemblance to a traditional African cuff bracelet. Not many people would have this sort of thought while feeding their pets. Even fewer would actually cut up the can, dip it in a silver bath, and use it as an accessory in a fashion collection, along with a few other previously uncelebrated kitchen items, such as mesh tea balls and steel-wool pads.

But Gaultier, who has had his own clothing label since 1976 and is considered one of fashion’s most influential and inventive designers, is not like many people. He finds a lot of ordinary things delightful; in fact, he is one of the most consistently enthusiastic people I’ve ever met. He hates what he thinks of as the French habit of being blasé, of dismissing just about everything as pas mal. Instead, his usual mode of speech is fuelled by high-octane superlatives. The cat-food can was “super-super-beautiful!” Talking about it reminded him of other similarly undervalued things that have interested him over the years, especially subcultures like British punks (“super-elegant!”), street people (“I saw someone, very poor, he put a big pullover over his coat, and I thought it was super-beautiful!”), Hasidim (“I saw a lot of rabbis with their traditional clothes. I was amazed by how fabulous and beautiful it was!”), and redheads (“I feel like, red hair, it’s a surprise! A good surprise! It’s super-beautiful!”).
He told me the story of his cat-food-can revelation in June, while we were having lunch in a restaurant in Montreal. Across the street, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts was presenting a large exhibition of his work called “The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk,” which will travel to Dallas and San Francisco and then to Europe. The night before, nearly a hundred thousand people had lined Sainte Catherine Street, in downtown Montreal, to watch a parade celebrating Gaultier and the museum show. In Gaultier’s honor, many of the onlookers were wearing something striped—French mariner stripes are one of his favorite visual themes—and little paper sailor caps that were being handed out on the street. Some people put the sailor caps on their dogs and their babies, too. The parade was noisy and lively and included two thousand dancers dressed in costumes that ranged from cancan skirts to opulent hip-hop outfits to wedding gowns, all representing aspects of Gaultier’s work. Gaultier himself marched at the front of the parade, flanked by a cohort of solemn-looking security guards, three pretty girls dressed as fairies, and some of his longtime models, and he was welcomed like the captain of a team that had won the Stanley Cup. Anytime he slowed his pace, people begged him to wait just a second so that they could have their picture taken with him. This kind of passionate public embrace struck me as astonishing for anyone, let alone a clothing designer, let alone one who had long been thought of as a bit subversive for having dressed men in skirts and used fetish fabrics like rubber and latex in haute couture, and for having once made a dress out of bread.

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The highlight of the parade came late in the proceedings, sometime after the inflatable Eiffel Tower and the dancers in neon-pink Hasidic outfits had passed by. Floating down Sainte Catherine Street came a giant balloon in the shape of one of Gaultier’s favorite things: a seamed, pointy bra. Except for its scale and its buoyancy, the bra was a lot like the one he had made for his Teddy bear, when he was a kid, and like the one that had brought him his first really far-reaching fame, when he designed it in satin and jewels for Madonna to wear on her Blond Ambition tour, in 1990. I asked him if he had ever imagined anything quite like this—the exhibition, the cheering citizenry, the giant floating cone bra. He grinned. “It is so fantastic,” he said. “It is”—he paused—“Oh là là!”

For more than thirty years, Gaultier has been known as the enfant terrible of fashion, but he is no longer an enfant, and, while he is still impish, he is also so respectful of tradition that it is hard to think of him as terrible. He is fifty-nine. His hair, which he used to wear in a bristly buzz cut, dyed platinum blond, is now gray and neatly trimmed. He has a prominent forehead and a fine mouth and chin. His ears are set low and stick out a little, which makes him look cute rather than handsome. He photographs well, and has the kind of animated, genial face that looks appealing on television, but he almost fainted when I asked him if he had ever considered modelling. “Me? No, no, no, never!” he said. “I didn’t like the way I looked at all.” He has always liked people whose looks were unusual, even extreme. He found himself, with his classic profile, “nothing special.”

Gaultier’s father was an accountant and his mother a clerk; he was an only child. They lived in a suburb of Paris, and were, as Gaultier describes it, of modest means. His grandparents lived nearby, and he spent as much time as he could with his maternal grandmother, Marie, a widow who ran a home business that sort of prefigured wellness counselling: she provided massage, facials, laying on of hands, and marriage advice to a clientele of local women. She doted on Gaultier; she let him watch television whenever he visited, so he soaked up hours of movies and shows, including a broadcast of performances at the Folies Bergère, which a less permissive adult might have considered too adult for a little boy.
Marie also often allowed Gaultier to sit in on her consultations with clients. To women who confided that their husbands were losing interest in them, she recommended that they jazz up their wardrobes. The idea that fashion was powerful enough to perhaps save a relationship fascinated Gaultier. Sometimes, as he listened to the counselling sessions, he drew before-and-after sketches of the women. The “before” image was how they looked when they came to his grandmother, and the “after” was how he thought they would look if they took her advice, which usually meant that they were transformed into, say, Ava Gardner or Marilyn Monroe.
From the time he was a boy, Gaultier also experimented with appearances, and Marie was a more or less willing accomplice. According to Gaultier’s cousin Évelyne, one of those experiments resulted in Marie’s hair being dyed blue. In the catalogue of the Montreal exhibition, there is a hilarious photograph of a teen-age Jean Paul working on Marie’s hair. He looks pleased; she looks as if she were being held for ransom. Gaultier talks about his grandmother frequently. He appreciates the fact that she spoiled him, and he found her eccentricity inspiring. For instance, Marie would go outside dressed just in her slip; she was that kooky. While he loved his mother, he says she was “less interesting” than his grandmother. But he also told me a story about how he had once quit a job, claiming that his grandmother had died. His mother knew about his fib, and, when he asked her to pick up his final paycheck, she decided to go dressed in mourning clothes. The gesture thrilled him. “I couldn’t believe she would do that!” he said. “That she would dress up like that, for me.”
The Gaultiers weren’t political, but they insisted on an openness and acceptance that was unusual for the time. Once, when Gaultier said something insulting about Arabs living in the neighborhood, his mother reprimanded him. “She said, ‘They are nice people, and you should shut up,’ ” he recalled. His mother already suspected that he was gay, and added that Jean Paul ought to think hard about being prejudiced, since he, too, could be the target of insults.
The insults did indeed come, at school, where Gaultier was the misfit kid who wasn’t good at any sports and felt rejected by the boys in his grade. Then he got caught doodling in class. After smacking him with a ruler, the teacher pinned the drawing to the back of his shirt and made him walk through all the classrooms as a shaming punishment. This discipline strategy had one fatal flaw: the drawing was of women in bras and fish-net stockings, inspired by the Folies Bergère shows that Gaultier had watched at his grandmother’s. Instead of being the object of ridicule, he became the object of great admiration among the boys. “It was like a passport,” he says. “I realized if I sketched, people would smile.”

The first time I saw Gaultier at work was last summer, when I visited him in Paris before his couture show for the Winter 2011 collection. His headquarters is not in the “golden triangle” off the Champs-Elysées, where most of the couture houses are, but in a former trade-union building, bearing the inscription “FUTURE OF THE PROLETARIAT,” on the ragtag Rue Saint-Martin, in the Marais. Inside, though, the building is all white and marble and imposing elegance. There were half a dozen women of unusual height and weight drifting around the hallways when I arrived. Because most of them were wearing ratty cutoffs and clunky work boots and, in one case, a T-shirt that said “I’m Busy, You’re Ugly, Have a Nice Day,” I knew that they were supermodels.

Upstairs in a workroom, Gaultier was doing a final fitting of a sheer navy-blue gown, trimmed with mink, on Karlie Kloss, an American teen-ager with important-looking eyebrows and a delicate mouth. The gown had drapes and folds and looked impossibly complicated, but Gaultier dismissed it by saying, “It’s just a scarf, and a little fur trim, and that makes a dress. It’s nothing, nothing!” It was actually quite something, regal and feminine and luxuriously classic. Gaultier became famous for designs that referenced bondage and sexuality, but many of his clothes, like the navy-blue dress, are quietly beautiful and well tailored, without any attempt to shock.
When I came into the workroom, Gaultier was pinching bits of fabric and adjusting the dress on Kloss, and then stepping back to consult with his corset-maker, who goes by the name of Mr. Pearl. Gaultier was wearing his usual attire of a black polo shirt and black jeans and a pair of scuffed shoes. Mr. Pearl, a small South African man who himself has worn a corset for years and at one time achieved a sixteen-inch waist, was studying the dress and rotating Kloss by pressing one hand on her hip. All the while, multiple conversations were going on, between Mr. Pearl and Gaultier, and Gaultier and his head seamstress, who scurried in and out of the room, and Gaultier and Kloss, who was saying, apropos of nothing, that she thought that someday scientists would be able to clone people. “I hope not,” Gaultier said, with a gasp. “I like that everybody’s unique.” There was a busy, pleasing clutter in the room; sketches of the collection were strewn over every surface, racks of dresses were lined up against a wall, and a worktable was piled with fancy gloves, hair ornaments, a box of Werther’s Original candies, a golden Buddha in a snow globe, a lot of green satin and velvet, and feathers. The feathers were especially important—the theme of the collection was “Black Swan,” and many of the pieces incorporated them. (After the show, Gaultier launched a scent for men that continued the feather theme—it is called Kokorico, which means “cock-a-doodle-doo.”) For his past collections, he has taken inspiration from all manner of sources: Frida Kahlo, James Bond, religious iconography. He loved the movie “Black Swan” and also a flamenco show that he’d seen in which one of the male dancers sprouted wings and basically turned into a rooster, so he decided that, for this collection, he would design around the twinned themes of dance and feathers.
The show was to take place in less than twenty-four hours, and many of the dresses weren’t finished, and the security for the show was complicated by the fact that one of the biggest-selling French pop stars of all time, Mylène Farmer, a longtime client of Gaultier’s, would be walking the runway. Her fans were already milling around on the Rue Saint-Martin, waving Sharpies and CD covers in the hope of an autograph. I wondered if Gaultier would be distracted and irritable, but he was in good humor, which seems to be his default mode. The film director Pedro Almodóvar, who met Gaultier in a club in the nineteen-eighties and became a close friend, said recently, “It’s impossible to get in a fight with him.” As Gaultier did a little more fabric-pinching on Kloss, he talked about the flamenco show that had inspired him, and that made him think about feathers in general—“They are so, so superb!”—which reminded him of the year that he bought a lot of live turkeys to give as Christmas gifts. “They made a huge destruction at the office,” he said. “They were . . . huge!” He laughed at the memory, and then added that the turkey-gift idea had come to him when he was still very much the enfant terrible—outrageous gifts of poultry were, evidently, part of the job. But he had not given the birds just for the sake of being outrageous; he thinks that they are beautiful, and he admires their natural instinct for strutting like models. After telling the turkey story, he took a break and insisted that everyone in the room have a Ladurée macaron. “Jean Paul’s favorite thing in the world is sugar,” his communications director, Jelka Music, told me later. “No, no, that’s not true. Couture first, sugar second.”

The fact that Gaultier does haute couture at all is remarkable. His house is one of the eleven formally recognized by the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture. He began the business in 1996, at a time when more couture houses were closing than were opening. By then, he had been working in fashion for more than twenty-five years; he had left high school early, in 1970, to work as a studio assistant for Pierre Cardin, the designer who pioneered space-age dresses, bubble skirts, and the modern tunic jacket beloved by the late Ferdinand Marcos. Gaultier idolized Cardin, who was uninterested in convention and unafraid of the couture syndicate, which is regulated by French law. (He was kicked out once, for having the nerve to sell ready-to-wear clothes in a department store.) After the stint at Cardin, Gaultier worked for Jacques Esterel, and then for Jean Patou, a fusty old French house, where he was mocked for the unconventional way he had begun dressing. As he once said, “When I arrived in the morning wearing my riding boots, the old salesladies would say to me, ‘Where’s your horse? Did you leave it outside?’ ”

The good thing about working for Patou, though, was that the experience mirrored Gaultier’s idea of what it would be like to work in fashion. Like many of his notions, this one sprang from a movie: the 1945 Jacques Becker film, “Falbalas,” about a philandering couturier who ends up falling in love with a friend’s wife, has a nervous breakdown, and jumps out a window with a mannequin. Gaultier loved the drama and the romance of the movie, and he also loved the world it described—the mansions where the couturiers worked, the ateliers staffed by legions of stern seamstresses, the precision and the detail of the work. He has said that if he hadn’t seen “Falbalas” he might not have become a designer. The House of Patou, headquartered in a spectacular eighteenth-century building, made him feel that he was living in his favorite film.

In 1974, Gaultier went back to work for Cardin, designing and producing ready-to-wear clothes for the American market. In the meantime, his boyfriend, Francis Menuge, encouraged him to establish his own line of ready-to-wear. Scraping together his own money, and relying on friends and family (his cousin Évelyne knit the sweaters, the concierge of his apartment building helped with the sewing, and Menuge made the accessories and handled the business arrangements), Gaultier presented his first collection in 1976, at a Paris planetarium. There were nine models, who wore dresses made from placemats, canvas, and upholstery fabric, and biker jackets with tutus. The clothes were sexy and witty, making use of iconic fashion motifs (toile, biker jackets, ballet costumes) in unpredictable ways and humble materials in reverential ways, and grafting unlikely components together. That spirit has guided his work ever since, conveying his appreciation of anything hybrid and surprising, and, as he explained, “the question of what is beautiful and what is not beautiful.” One of the phrases Gaultier uses often is “Why not?,” which he delivers with his eyebrows lifted and his shoulders raised, as if he were a human interrobang. He says it most often to explain a lot of the decisions he makes with clothes. Why would someone wear a tutu with a biker jacket? Well, why not?

Many of the other young designers of his generation, such as Christian Lacroix and John Galliano, riffed on opulence and luxury; their clothes evoked a fantasy world of wealth and exclusivity. Gaultier was more interested in what he saw on the street: London kids with sky-high Mohawks and safety-pinned kilts, fetishists with full-body tattoos, African women in Paris who wore men’s overcoats on top of traditional dress. His fantasy world was one where ethnicity and gender were comfortably jumbled—a kimono could be spliced onto a double-breasted suit, or a ball gown could be made of camouflage fabric or, even better, of camouflage fabric that on closer inspection revealed itself to be colored bunches of nylon tulle, a cheap material usually used only for tutus and wedding dresses.
His choice of models was also part of his effort to conjure a world without boundaries. In the mid-seventies, fashion was ruled by towering blondes, including Jerry Hall, Cheryl Tiegs, and Margaux Hemingway. Gaultier chose unconventional models of all races; some were bald or tattooed (or bald and tattooed), some overweight, some elderly, others extreme in some way. His beauty ideal was the fierce, androgynous French model Farida Khelfa; her appearance in his shows was the first time that a model of North African descent had had such prominence. There were only nine journalists at Gaultier’s first show, but the collection drew enough attention so that, within two years, his clothes were being sold at the influential Paris boutique Bus Stop, and were being championed by the Japanese apparel company Kashiyama.
Among the first pieces he designed were his tattoo “skins”: long-sleeved tight-fitting stretch-nylon tops that were printed with the bursting roses, pierced hearts, and tribal swirls of body art. But not everything that Gaultier designed was pure invention. He was also interested in tradition: not conformity for the sake of conformity but those traditions of clothing, such as the trenchcoat and the sailor shirt, which were timeless and, above all, very French. It’s just that he looked at them in a different way. What if you took a trenchcoat and made it into a dress? Or made it in red satin? Or made the sleeves into huge, draping bat wings or layered them with feathers? Well, why not?

Gaultier says that he met Madonna in 1987, after her concert at the Parc de Sceaux, outside Paris. He had been a fan from the moment he first saw her, singing “Holiday” on television. “I thought, Oh, my God! That look is incredible!” Gaultier recalled. “The fish-nets! The jewelry! The stomach! The little boots! Truly, it was the same spirit of what I was doing, a little rebellious. Then I saw her on the MTV music awards singing ‘Like a Virgin,’ wearing a wedding dress, with the masturbation. . . . American show business was very shocked, but she was fantastic!” As it happened, Madonna was a fan of Gaultier’s. She wore one of his dresses, in black, to the 1985 American Music Awards and, a few months later, she wore the same dress, only in white, to the première of the film “Desperately Seeking Susan.” By that time, Gaultier had attracted a passionate audience—in 1985, four thousand people lined up to see his collection—and had opened his first boutique, in Paris. Madonna stopped in after her concert. (“Can you imagine?” Gaultier said to me, in a hushed voice. “Back then, even big stars actually bought clothes instead of borrowing them.”)

A few years earlier, he had begun making his first corset dresses—boned, bra-topped corsets that continued past the hips to qualify as legal street wear. He had first seen a corset at his grandmother’s. It was salmon pink, and he was struck by the luscious fabric and the delicate stitching: “I felt so much admiration for it. My grandmother explained to me that she wore it to have a slim waist, and that she had to drink vinegar to give herself a stomach contraction so it could be laced tightly. Like so!” He drew in his breath sharply, to demonstrate how his grandmother would collapse her stomach. “It’s like theatre!” He really liked Madonna, and he told her that he would like to make a corset dress for her.
These days, an exposed bra strap or a lingerie-style top is commonplace, but it wasn’t in the early nineteen-eighties. Foundation garments were demonized as anti-feminist and subjugating, and were not flaunted—if they were worn at all. But his grandmother’s corset and her intricately seamed bra struck Gaultier as celebratory, rather than confining, as did any article of clothing that conveyed the idea of the body and of flesh, especially if it scrambled usual notions of gender—even though fashion was then in the thrall of a new group of Japanese designers, including Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo, whose intellectual, architectural clothing was, if anything, anti-flesh and gender-neutral. Then one of Gaultier’s employees came to work wearing a Chanel jacket, unbuttoned, over nothing but a lacy bra, which reminded him of his grandmother walking around in her slip. He decided to design some clothes that were an elaboration on her lingerie. In some of the pieces, he exaggerated the cups of the bra, so that they looked like inverted ice-cream cones or an African fertility carving. He called the collection Dada, and it was an immediate sensation. The corset-dresses were analyzed for their politics—was dressing a woman in a corset enslaving or empowering?—and for their shock value. Gaultier says that he was surprised at the commotion. “I didn’t know there would be a reaction,” he said. “I did it quite naturally!” Pedro Almodóvar confirmed that Gaultier’s motivation was ingenuous. “He has an outrageous side,” Almodóvar told me, “but he’s far too innocent and authentic to shock for shock’s sake. He’s very sexual but never dirty. He can be provocative, but he’s not a poseur, trying to be scandalous.”
By the mid-eighties, Gaultier had collaborated with a number of artists. He had designed costumes for the French actress Annie Girardot, and for performances choreographed by Régine Chopinot. But he had never collaborated with a star as big as Madonna, who asked him to design costumes—three hundred and fifty-eight of them—for Blond Ambition. The tour was a sold-out success around the world, and Gaultier’s costumes were acclaimed. In particular, the pink corset bodysuit, with exaggerated conical bra cups, which the blond, ponytailed Madonna wore over black menswear trousers, became one of the indelible images of the era.

One day this past summer, a mother and daughter named Donna and Meghan Spears stopped by the Aeffe showroom, in midtown Manhattan. Aeffe is an Italian luxury-goods company that produces, distributes, wholesales, and does public relations for Gaultier’s ready-to-wear line in the United States. The Spearses own a designer boutique called Consortium, in Oklahoma City, and Gaultier is the best-selling designer in the store. They were in town to order the next season. I admitted to the Spearses that I wouldn’t have guessed that Gaultier had many fans in Oklahoma, but Donna said, “Oklahoma City is much more progressive than people think. In our target market, everyone has more than one home, more than one airplane. In the past, everyone went to Dallas or Aspen or La Jolla to shop. Now they come to us. At the end of the season, we never have any Gaultier left.”

The Aeffe house models took turns around the showroom, wearing a range of clothes from dresses with clever draping in flowered fabric to smart-looking tailored suits. Michelle Stein, the president of Aeffe, looked on as Juliette Dumesnil, the firm’s sales director for the Gaultier line, ran through a narration that was peppered with phrases like “We have this in a lot of different color ways” and “That’s a good price point for a lot of drama.” The Spearses were ecstatic. “Mom!” Meghan said, when she saw a knit dress she particularly liked. “I love this!”
“Me, too,” Donna said. “I think that’s the most perfect thing I’ve seen.”
Next, a model came out in a stretch poplin top that had a hint of a Gaultier cone bra in its shape.
“Oh, my God,” Meghan said. She nudged her mother, and they both nodded at Dumesnil.
“I know we’re going to buy just about everything,” Donna Spears said. “We can’t afford to look at this collection!”
A lot changed for Gaultier around the time of Blond Ambition, which, in many ways, started him on the path that led to being a best-selling designer in Oklahoma City. The association with Madonna vaulted him to a kind of recognition rare for a clothing designer. In addition to his ready-to-wear line, he began designing costumes for movies, including Almodóvar’s “Kika” and Luc Besson’s “The Fifth Element,” for which he was nominated for a César, the French equivalent of an Oscar. He launched a perfume, called Jean-Paul Gaultier, which came in a corset-shaped bottle packed in a tin can, and went on to sell more than sixty-five million units. He also branched out from fashion and recorded a house-music song, “Aow Tou Dou Zat,” which ended up in the Top 100 on the European dance charts. The CD cover featured a stylized photograph of Gaultier, his hair in full spike, a puckish smile on his face. In the nineties, he was the co-host of a wildly successful, British magazine-style television series called “Eurotrash.”
When Gaultier was working on Blond Ambition, Francis Menuge was stricken by a devastating AIDS-related illness. Menuge had handled the business side of Gaultier’s work since his first show, and they had been a couple for fifteen years. When he died, in 1990, Gaultier found it hard to continue with the business they had created together. He thought about quitting fashion, but decided to stay with it, and even to look into designing a couture line, as Menuge had urged him to do for years. It was a huge commitment, one far more demanding than designing ready-to-wear clothing. To be officially sanctioned by the couture syndicate, a designer must create made-to-order clothing for private clients, employ at least fifteen full-time craftspeople, and, twice a year, present a collection of at least thirty-five outfits, some for day and some for evening. Couture houses almost always operate at a loss; they exist to showcase the designers’ most unencumbered fantasies. Very few people buy couture, since one dress can easily cost fifty thousand dollars. Most customers can only afford something from a designer’s ready-to-wear line—or a perfume—whose brand has been made more valuable because he or she designs couture.
By the mid-nineties, the number of couture customers was shrinking, and there was a nagging feeling that the business was decadent, and dying. At first glance, Gaultier—he of the cat-food-can bracelet—would seem to be the last person interested in having a couture house, but he was the person who had grown up dreaming of “Falbalas,” and who, despite his rascally reputation, was deeply respectful of the French grand tradition. (“When we get together in Paris,” Pedro Almodóvar told me, “he takes me to some restaurant, not posh and trendy, but really traditional French cuisine.” After a moment, he added, “And then maybe we go to the latest transvestite show.”) In 1996, Gaultier says, he met with Bernard Arnault, the chairman of the fashion conglomerate LVMH, which owns Dior, Fendi, Givenchy, and Céline, among other brands. Gaultier thought that perhaps he would go to Dior, which was looking for a new head couturier. But Arnault wanted John Galliano, who had been a success at Givenchy, where he had spent the previous year, to take over Dior, and, according to Gaultier, Arnault wanted him to take Galliano’s place at Givenchy. Gaultier was dismayed. “I thought Givenchy was very bourgeois,” he said. “I loved Saint Laurent, Dior, Cardin. Givenchy was not a dream of mine. So I told Mr. Arnault no, I was not dreaming of Givenchy.”
Instead, he opened a couture house under his own name. He showed his first couture collection in 1997; Nicole Kidman bought one of the first pieces. “My God, Nicole Kidman!” he said. “I had a client!” He had thought he would do just the one collection, but he quickly discovered that he loved the freedom of designing couture, where, if he could imagine a full-body corset encrusted with Chantilly lace, or a unitard that was beaded with anatomical details, so that the wearer looked nude but sparkling, he could have it made. And he loved being in the atelier every day, tweaking and fussing over the pieces, working with the seamstresses and the hatmakers and the beaders and the corset-makers. (He also showed men’s couture—the first designer to do so.) So he did another collection and then another. In the early years, he showed as many as a hundred and twenty outfits. “I have a defect,” he confessed, saying that he allows himself to explore too many ideas, and that he admired designers like Rei Kawakubo, whose collections explore a single, rigorous theme. “But I love it,” he said, excitedly. “What I love is the process! I love it!”

Over all, the past several years have been gloomy ones for fashion, particularly for some of Gaultier’s contemporaries. The recession forced Christian Lacroix to leave his own company, and Yohji Yamamoto narrowly escaped bankruptcy (he was saved by an angel investor). Others have self-combusted, or nearly so. Marc Jacobs battled drug and alcohol addiction (he is now clean). Dior fired John Galliano, who was recently convicted of making anti-Semitic remarks, which he attributed to his problems with alcohol and prescription drugs. Alexander McQueen committed suicide in 2010. Ron Frasch, the president of Saks Fifth Avenue, which is one of Gaultier’s biggest retailers in the United States, told me that he sometimes wondered how designers bear the pressure of the job, now that it requires more than just being able to draw a pretty dress. “They’re in the position of creative leadership of a whole brand,” he said. “Image, store development, packaging, fragrance—it’s so much more than it was ten years ago. And there’s an enormous amount of expectation of constant newness.”

Gaultier has had setbacks: his only boutique in the United States, on Madison Avenue, closed in 2005, and, like everyone else in the luxury business since the recession, he has seen his orders drop. Stores have asked him to sell some items, like accessories, on consignment, and a number of the shops that carried his line have gone out of business. But he has also thrived. From 2003 to 2010, in addition to creating his own lines, he served as the head designer of Hermès. He has dressed Juliette Binoche, Catherine Deneuve, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, and a dozen other celebrities; made costumes for two more Almodóvar films; and designed furniture for Roche Bobois and a special limited collection of clothes for Target, among countless other collaborations. “He keeps his feet on the ground,” Frasch says. “I think he’s enormously savvy.”
Even Gaultier’s riskiest moves have often paid off. For instance, he has famously advocated that men wear skirts, showing them for the first time in 1984, in a collection he called “Boy Toy.” Of course, the sight of a brooding male model, wearing a five-o’clock shadow and a skirt, set off all manner of comment. Gaultier says that he had no intention of making a statement or of being provocative; he was inspired by tradition, including the long aprons that waiters wear in brasseries, by togas and kilts, and by one of his male models, who had shown up for a fitting wearing a sarong, looking very masculine. Gaultier sold three thousand of the skirts, and continues to include them in his collections. “It was not a gay statement—quite the contrary,” he said. “Men were changing—they were not so macho. So I thought, Why not?”

In the summer of 2009, Nathalie Bondil, the director and chief curator of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, approached Gaultier with a proposal to mount an exhibition of his work. Before settling on Gaultier, Bondil had considered doing an Alexander McQueen exhibition. “He also had a very strong visual world,” Bondil said. “But Jean Paul Gaultier is like smiling sunshine. McQueen is the dark moon.” Gaultier says that he was reluctant but Bondil convinced him that the exhibition could really reflect his way of looking at the world. “I wanted something very, very alive,” he said. “I didn’t want something dead—a museum can seem dead, the clothes are very old, it’s like a funeral.” He thought that if the exhibition could show his obsessions—“flesh, ethnicity, different kinds of global beauty, cinema, my interest with Madonna, tattoos, the Parisienne, the male as object, all that kind of thing”—he would consent. Thierry Loriot, who is in charge of fashion and design projects at the museum and was the chief curator for the exhibition, interviewed almost everyone who has been instrumental to Gaultier’s career, and began looking through some eight thousand pieces that he had designed over the years. Loriot selected a hundred and forty for the show, along with accessories, photographs, archival materials, and seventy videos. So far, more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand people have seen the exhibition.

Gaultier’s favorite thing—besides sugar and couture—is film, and the exhibition ended up echoing his beloved “Falbalas.” He said, “At the end of ‘Falbalas,’ there is a beautiful scene—it’s the presentation of the couturier’s collection.” Then he described how the couturier, who is starting to go mad, stares at a mannequin, which suddenly becomes an apparition of the woman he loves. The way the mannequin came to life gave Gaultier the idea of making mannequins for the show that would also somehow come alive. “Why not?” he said, shrugging. He had seen a theatre performance in Avignon that used video projections and blank mannequin faces to create a similar illusion, so he approached Denis Marleau and Stéphanie Jasmin, the directors of the experimental theatre company Ubu, and together they created thirty-two animated mannequins that talk, wink, smile, and sigh. The effect is startlingly realistic, but slightly unnerving. The first mannequin you see in the show is one of Gaultier, chatting and laughing and exclaiming, as he often does.
The show itself is mind-boggling; there is a gown made to look like the skin of a leopard, fashioned entirely from beads; thigh-high tights made of Chinese-print satin; mermaid dresses that drape into swirls of liquidy fabric; long skirts with mariner stripes, made entirely of tiny feathers. While I walked around the exhibition, most of what I heard people saying was: “It’s amazing.” The visitors that day were the kind of mixed bag that would have made Gaultier happy—a lot of fashionable young women, some gay couples, a few families with children, and a number of elderly people, who tilted their bifocals so that they could examine the fabrics more closely. One of the older couples was paused in front of the section that showcased the first of Gaultier’s men’s skirts. I asked them what they thought of the clothes. “It’s a little, you know, ‘out there’ for me,” the woman replied. She and her husband moved on to the next section, most of which consisted of variations on bondage costumes. “Everything these days is mix and match,” the woman went on. “Soon we won’t know who is who.” Gaultier is thrilled with the way the exhibition has turned out. “It’s like a dream come true, in reality, for me,” he said. “It’s alive, it’s a story, it’s a movie. It is like a dream!”

These days, Gaultier lives alone, in Paris. He has a boyfriend who lives in Greece, and they see each other when they can. He doesn’t think that he will ever be as close to anyone as he was to Menuge. “He and I did something together,” he said. “We did my company. It was like our baby.” Most days, Gaultier works, then goes to the movies, then reads a book, then works some more. Facing his sixtieth birthday, with a major exhibition of his work travelling the world, has made him a little philosophical. He looks back at his old collections more than he used to. For his couture collection, he now designs about forty-five outfits—more than the thirty-five that are required, but not the flood of clothes that he created in his first seasons. He has a staff of seamstresses and public-relations people and helpers, but he designs everything himself: the couture, the ready-to-wear, the jewelry, the menswear, the nautical collection, the accessories, and the packaging for the fragrances, as well as Piper-Heidsieck limited-edition champagne bottles, a knit collection, lingerie, and children’s clothes. The last really great assistant he had was Martin Margiela, who left, more than twenty years ago, with Gaultier’s blessing, to do his own collection. “In the future, to be honest, I’d love to delegate some of my work,” Gaultier said. “But I can’t teach someone. I have to find someone who matches my sensibility.”

I couldn’t help but wonder whether someone who has been designing so much for so many years could remember every piece he had done. In particular, I wondered if he could remember a dress that I bought at least ten years ago. It’s a long-sleeved ankle-length oversized black T-shirt dress, decorated with halftone photographs. What’s striking about it is that the photographs are of a world that couldn’t possibly exist. In one, a Mongolian man is standing in front of a herd of giraffes, beside someone who looks a little like Marlon Brando in “The Godfather,” who is staring at what might be a trombone. There is also a photograph of an Inuit family in the desert.
“I remember that dress,” Gaultier said, when I described it to him. I asked what he had been thinking about when he designed it. “I think the long line of the black dress, that’s very nice; it looks very beautiful for a woman to wear a long line like that,” he replied. And what about the photographs? He started to laugh and tilted his head to the side. “I take what I like from here, and what I like from there, and put them together. I suppose that’s my fantasy world. Impossible, I know, but that’s my fantasy.” ♦

Source: The New Yorker!