MAVERICK DESIGNER
Enfant terrible Jean Paul Gaultier is far from done
For Jean Paul Gaultier, it all began at the movies.
“It was a tragic love story of a couturier. I saw it when I was 13,” said the French designer, who came through Montreal last week for the local wrap-up of the touring wedding-themed exhibition Love is Love: Wedding Bliss for All à la Jean Paul Gaultier.
The film Gaultier is recalling as if he’d seen it mere days ago is Jacques Becker’s 1945 drama Falbalas (English title: Paris Frills), starring Raymond Rouleau and Micheline Presle. Take a look at stills online and you might have a hard time drawing a direct connection between the stylish but somewhat subdued wartime esthetic on display and the radical anythinggoes haute couture designs that have made Gaultier the perennial enfant terrible of international fashion. Nevertheless, a seed had been planted.
“It was very good at showing how it was at work, in the atelier,” said Gaultier of Falbalas. “I said to myself, ‘I want to do that.’ ”
Proceeding without the aid of formal study — “I was learning by myself, reading fashion magazines like they were the Bible” — the teenage Gaultier sent drawings to every possible fashion house before improbably being taken on by Pierre Cardin.
“It was my 18th birthday,” Gaultier recalled of his start with the man he calls his most important mentor. “I was very lucky. He opened the door. I don’t know why, because my sketches were not so nice, but he found something in them. His attitude was all about breaking the rules, and he could do that because it was his own house.”
Inheriting Cardin’s ethic of independence has done more than serve Gauthier well in his life and career; it has attracted him to mavericks in other fields. A random street survey would probably indicate that Gaultier’s greatest name recognition comes from his association with Madonna, who wore the iconic Gaultier cone bra on her 1990 Blonde Ambition tour. A less celebrated artist who looms just as large is German singer Klaus Nomi, a one-off blender of opera and electro-pop who made waves in New York avant-garde circles before becoming one of the earliest public figures to die of AIDS-related causes in 1983. Gaultier paid tribute to Nomi in his Spring 2009 couture show.
“I was drawn to his strangeness,” Gaultier said of Nomi. “He appeared with his futuristic clothes and music in a period when I was just beginning my own haute couture, a time when the new was arriving, at the end of the ’70s. David Bowie, too, was someone who influenced me a lot. (Gaultier paid homage to Bowie with a 2013 runway show featuring models dressed and coiffed in the singer’s Ziggy Stardust look.) Both of them were — I shouldn’t even say androgynous, it was more than that, it was a complete conceptual thing, artists mixing all kinds of things like I wanted to do in fashion.”
For Gaultier Love is Love, named for Barack Obama’s statement in favour of gay marriage and produced by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, represents the fruit of a longtime fascination with French Canada.
“The first knowledge I had (of Quebec) came from singers like Diane Tell, who were very popular when I was young,” he said. “That generation (of artists) had more beautiful voices than the French singers. They were our cousins, part of our family.”
When the opportunity arose and Gaultier made the first of many professional and personal visits, he noted certain differences.
“In architecture, things are bigger in Canada because it’s a bigger continent,” he observed. “In Quebec, people are very sympathique, unlike Parisians who are very snobbish. I also could hear that the French-Canadian speaks the old French, mixed with English, so it’s a dual language, with an expressiveness that’s more jovial. In France, when we want to say something is good, we say ‘not bad.’ We make it negative. The glass is always half empty. That is the French way. French journalists are already criticizing Macron, our new president, instead of giving him a chance to express himself.”
In Quebec, people are very sympathique, unlike Parisians who are very snobbish. I also could hear that the French-Canadian speaks the old French, mixed with English, so it’s a dual language, with an expressiveness that’s more jovial. In France, when we want to say something is good, we say ‘not bad.’
“He went to Greece recently and he spoke to them in Greek, he is trying to connect to people, which is very important, but in France they do not see it that way.”
Human connection and the breaking down of cultural and gender boundaries are at the heart of Love is Love, curated by Montrealer Thierry-Maxime Loriot. And as Gaultier and the MMFA have seen, the line between inclusiveness and appropriation can become disputed. One particular piece in Love is Love, first designed by Gaultier in 2002, has drawn criticism from several quarters: a wedding gown, worn by a woman, featuring a white-feather-headdress inspired by Plains First Nations tradition. Gaultier, for his part, professes only the most honourable of motives.
“In my conception of clothes, and in my general creation, I have always had a mix of cultures, so this is an example of that. For me it was not to make a joke, just as it was not a joke when I did a Hasidic collection. It is to show the beauty of it. That is my purpose. The headdress was traditionally symbolic of power and leadership, and it was traditionally reserved for men, so I thought it would be interesting to suggest that a woman could have more power than a man.”
A case for Gaultier’s defence was effectively stated at the MMFA on Sept. 8, when Kent Monkman, an artist of mixed Cree and AngloIrish descent whose work is in the museum’s permanent collection, participated with Gaultier in Another Feather in Her Bonnet, a short performance piece in which the two artists engage in a mock wedding ceremony, mutually vowing to build respect and cultural understanding in “a symbol of all possible unions.” The broader debate isn’t about to end, but the argument in favour has now been stated more clearly.
The enfant terrible who still exudes the energy and enthusiasm of a newcomer is nevertheless 65 this year, and given to thoughts of how things have changed. Aspiring designers today, he says, are stepping into a very different landscape than the one he knew when Cardin took a flyer on him.
“Now there is less freedom,” he said. “In the beginning, I was free, and why? Because I had no money. Now it is money, money, money, signing an actress to a contract to wear your line. Fashion today, it seems, is not to be worn, it is to be shown. That is why I am now doing only haute couture, not ready-towear.”
Asked what ambitions he still has to fulfil, Gaultier’s response is perhaps not surprising given that long ago he pioneered the use of golden-age models on the catwalk.
“When I was a child I remember being in the countryside in France and seeing three generations of a family in the same house,” he said. “I want to show that we shouldn’t reject old people, that we should still keep the feeling of family, which has been disappearing. I want to show the beauty of getting old.”