THE RADICAL LINE OF JEAN PAUL GAULTIER
Two years after his surprise collaboration with Supreme and Vans, and as he prepares to unleash a panoply of provocative new collaborative projects, we look at the seditious brilliance of Monsieur Gaultier.
“My job was to feel what’s happening in society. Fashion has to keep in touch with life and reality. What does it reflect today? A complex and chaotic world in which politics and environmental issues are urgent.” This is how, on 23 January 2020, Jean Paul Gaultier announced his retirement from the couture runway after a 50-year career. He immediately went on to say that his brand is going ahead “with a new project that I’ve conceived, and it will be revealed to you very soon”. Although as-yet not fully disclosed, it is understood that Gaultier’s new project includes a series of collaborative capsules co-designed with many more of today’s most exciting creative voices in fashion.
Shortly after this issue goes to press, later in April, L’Uomo will share one of its first iterations via a specially shot skate video featuring archive pieces played against the new. This new direction reflects the spirit of Gaultier’s maison and its heritage of fearlessly expressed revolution in clothing. Inspired by street fashions and subcultures, the designer has long explored and reinterpreted societal symbols irreverently. “We need to be a reflection of the society that surrounds us,” said Gaultier, “and we need to digest the world around us and show it in our work. Otherwise our work isn’t really relevant. When I did the corset dress in 1982 I saw the change happening around me, and after the feminists who burnt their bras in the 1970s, my girlfriends were wearing lingerie again. They chose to be sexy but on their own terms.” There was also an underlying link with punk. “That was around 1975. I wasn’t a punk myself, but I was pretty rebellious. And I love London. There was energy, sense of humour, freedom and individuality. People put them on display. That was soon the same in Berlin. There were real punks there. Not like in America, where the basic feeling is commerce and not revolution. When the English people destroy something, they don’t pretend to destroy, they really destroy it. It’s not like Hollywood. And I loved it, even if I wasn’t an anarchist myself.”
The couturier’s “counter-fashion” has profoundly strong personal roots. Raised in the Paris suburb of Arcueil, he never attended fashion school, yet his intuitively driven sketches astonished Pierre Cardin, who hired him as an assistant in 1970. Long before his time, Gaultier’s formula also included sustainability: even his very first collection was entirely recycled. “I worked with table mats and made boleros out of them. In a department store I discovered unfinished embroidery pictures on tulle-like canvas and sewed them with their hanging threads onto the backs of the boleros. It wasn’t finished, but that was beautiful.” Even if taken from Gaultier’s past, these remain potent ideas for our future.