Culture

Born and brought up in the Paris suburbs, Jean-Paul Gaultier has been sublimating images of the capital in his collections for twenty-five years, from the Saint-Germain of the existentialists to Pigalle’s cocky humour. Having joined the closed world of haute couture in 1997, he is today looked upon as a model inside the world of fashion, whose rules he has broken the better to redefine them.

"My view of Paris is all in clichés. I’m still the suburbanite who dreams of the capital, and that’s why I so much enjoy being there. Going back to the Café de Flore, it’s as if I’ve rediscovered the time when I had time. A bread soldier with a boiled egg and a milky coffee make me deliriously happy. With haute couture, I have the same feeling of things being right with the world, of being at peace with myself. When a design isn’t finished, I let it rest. That’s what true luxury is", Jean-Paul Gaultier told Le Monde in August 2000.

Populated by pretty girls, "titis"  [1] and the beautiful people, his Paris resembles the photographs of the thirties by Brassaï, Doisneau or Man Ray against a background of Arletty retorts or Piaf songs. Born in Arcueil, in the Paris suburbs, in 1952, this son of accountants has the knack of mixing images in his collection, from the colours of Barbès to the "zazou" [2]chic of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

He has made mixing cultures a style, celebrating differences in shows that pay tribute to the Hassidic Jews of Brooklyn, the boxers of the Bronx or to the Eskimos.

The art of mixing

"I found those huge American or Swedish models had something slightly inhuman, and more often than not insipid, about them. Because it was their job to parade on the catwalk, they couldn’t care less about the clothes. They had no real feeling for them. So my idea was to take girls who liked fashion, who were pleased to wear it, and show it at its best", he explained as early as 1983, in the book La Mode pour la vie [Fashion for Living] (Marylène Delbourg-Delphis, pub. Autrement, Paris), he who had got short women, fat women, old women, women with tattoos, men dressed as women and women dressed as men to parade down the catwalk.

Joining Pierre Cardin in 1970, then following this, working at Jean Patou he had his first "couture shock" when faced with Yves Saint Laurent’s "Libération" collection in 1971, which perpetuated and renewed his elders’ feeling for cut and precise lines.

In October 2001, he will celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of his own brand created in 1976 with two childhood friends, Francis Menuge and Donald Potard, still President and Managing Director of the name that encompasses ready-to-wear and tightly controlled licences including perfumes like Le Mâle, one of the best selling "pongs" in Europe. Between his couture collection, "Gaultier Paris", his men’s and women’s ready-to-wear and his JPG Jeans line, his designs are sold in more than 200 retail outlets in France and abroad.

A world seems to separate his recognition by haute couture in 1997, his fashion shows in the Noailles mansion in Paris and the period when he had the singer, Sapho, emerge from a coffin and when he sent live turkeys to fashion writers for Christmas. The man who the Countess of Paris described, in a treatise on good manners in 1986, as an "irreverent young man, a lover of outlandish fashion shows" is today worshipped by those who used to abhor him, dressing both the Lebanese billionairess, Muna Ayub and American women bankers. "I am sure that if I were making the same clothes I was making fifteen years ago, those I shocked then would say "Oh yes, it’s very couture!" because now I’m a couturier ", remarked the former presenter of the television programme "Eurotrash" at the end of 1999, in a Financial Times supplement.

A classic iconoclast

Very well known to the general public for his corsets (inspired by his grandmother, Marie), his skirts for men, his variations on the seaman’s jersey or tin cans recycled into bracelets, Jean-Paul Gaultier - who made the stage costumes for Madonna, the world star, and for Yvette Horner, a traditional French accordionist - has always worked hard to break the rigidity of the wardrobe, lining camouflage fabric jackets with mink or dissecting suits horizontally in his Winter 2001-2002 ready-to-wear collection, drifting through jigsaw puzzle garments cut up with thin silver chains attached to them.

"Dresses that undress", he says of his sublime couture collection presented in January 2001 in a judicious tangle of jet fringes, a "sprinkling" of velvet bobbles and hat veils which celebrate a masterly expertise, a long way from last minute rips and tears. Who, among his detractors of days gone by, could have thought that the famous Hermès company would, as they did in July 1999, take a 35% share in his capital? This "union of the carriage and the seaman’s jersey" presages the growth of the brand on the international stage and the opening of some fifteen shops in his name between now and 2005.

Moving in 1999 from the status of "guest member" to that of specialist couturier in the trade’s official directory (the first since Christian Lacroix in 1987), he is one of the very few with Yves Saint Laurent to sell his couture and to work on day wear when others can do no more than attempt to create the dress of Cinderella’s dreams. Besides, Pierre Bergé [3] had no hesitation in saying that he was "the greatest since Yves Saint Laurent".