Jean Paul Gaultier
French fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier founded his namesake House in early 1980s. Well-known for his avant-garde designs and iconoclastic collections the House was deemed provocative and has always garnered strong reactions across the fashion world.
Index
The Origin
Brand Development
Gaultier Style
Famous Celebrities in Gaultier
Exhibition
Current Situation
The Origin
Jean Paul Gaultier, the French Haute Couturist and pret-a-porter designer was born on 24th April 1952. His mother was a clerk and father an accountant. It was his maternal grandmother who introduced him to the world of fashion. He never received formal training as a designer. Instead, he started sending sketches to famous couture stylists at an early age.
Pierre Cardin was impressed by his talent and hired him as an assistant in 1970. He went on to work with Jacques Esterel in 1971 and Jean Patou later that year. He then was made in charge of managing the Pierre Cardin boutique in Manila for a year in 1974.
Brand Development
He presented his first individual collection in 1976. A cutting-edge selection of his now-signature features; statement sailor-inspired suiting, sharp silhouettes and an aesthetic that blurred the lines between masculine and feminine style. However, it wasn’t until six years later in 1982 that he officially launched his own design house and a further three years after that when he opened his first store in Paris.
Not content with the stir that his 1984 menswear collection caused when he first sent male models down the runway in mid-length skirts and biker boots, Gaultier went on to make headlines in 1990 when he designed Madonna’s iconic conical bras, and again in 1993 when he launched his namesake fragrance. The year 1988 marked the launch of the first collection of “Junior Gaultier”, a lower-priced line designed for the youth market with a heavy nautical influence that he began to carry throughout all of his collections.
In 1989, Jean-Paul Gaultier released a record “How to do that” in collaboration with Tony Mansfield. In the same year, he also designed costumes for Peter Greenaway’s film “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover”. “Gaultier Jean’s” collection was launched in 1992 (which was then replaced with Jean’s Paul Gaultier from 2004 to 2008). The year also marked the retrospective of JEAN-PAUL GAULTIER’S collections presented in Los-Angeles (USA) for the benefit of the AIDS research (Amfar) and subsequently in Austria in 1995. 1997 saw the launch of Gaultier’s haute couture line. The Junior Gaultier label was replaced in 1994 with JPG by Gaultier, a unisex collection that followed the designer’s idea of fluidity of the sexes.
Gaultier was nominated Chevalier of Legion of Honour in 2001. The year 2002 saw the inauguration of his first boutique in New York. He was made the Creative Director of Hermes between 2003 and 2010 while still designing for his own label. “Unisex” GAULTIER the new perfume was launched in 2005 and four years later in 2009, Junior Gaultier’s name was reused again for the launching of the child’s wear, to be completed with a Baby Line in 2011. He left Hermes in 2010 with a view to concentrate solely on his own label but just a year later, Gaultier moved once again- this time to Diet Coke. Here, he lead the aesthetic across all creative platforms and designed a range of the brand’s eponymous glass drinks bottles, following prestigious predecessors such as Matthew Williamson, Roberto Cavalli and (perhaps most famously) Karl Lagerfeld. Perfecting the art of versatility, in 2011, he created his first intimates’ collection alongside luxury label, La Perla.
Today, the Jean Paul Gaultier fashion house works solely on the couture line after the designer closed his ready to wear and menswear labels in 2014 to allow for a more concentrated effort in this area. Autumn/Winter 2017 collection took inspiration from ski culture, with sharply-shouldered silhouettes fastening at the front with statement zips, block-colour panelling mimicking traditional sporting attire and bejewelled necklines nodding to the lavish lifestyle found in the likes of Val d’Isère and Verbier.
Gaultier Style
Gaultier has always been noted for his consistency of style. Initially he favoured dark colours, especially red, brown, navy blue, deep purple, and black; later he lightened his palette through the addition of salmon, bronze, beige, and turquoise. Typical components of his collections included broad-shouldered jackets, textured or patterned stockings, trench coats of all sorts, baggy pants, flowing skirts, and the horizontally striped sailor’s shirts that became the signature of his style. Gaultier received most of his thematic inspiration from astrology, religious symbols, Celtic designs, calligraphy, tattoos, and regional apparel from around the world.
Through the exaggeration and provocative pairing of various elements of style, Gaultier aimed to destabilize established social categories and conventions. His women’s collections, for instance, often incorporated masculine jackets, hats, and leather, and his menswear frequently featured such feminine elements as skirts, corsets, and gossamer fabric. Gaultier’s designs also tended to amplify sexuality, often by blurring the boundary between underwear and outerwear. Perhaps the most widely recognized of his hypersexual works are the conical bras that he created for American pop singer Madonna’s 1990 Blond Ambition tour. In 1993 Gaultier presented one of his most controversial culture-blending and gender-bending collections, “Chic Rabbis,” based on Hasidic religious attire. Critics disapproved of the treatment of the ritual clothing as costumes on a catwalk and, more significantly, were offended by the presentation of women in rabbinic clothing. In his men’s collections, Gaultier evoked the world traveller—and border crosser—most conspicuously through the pairing of Sikh-style turbans variously with tuxedos, T-shirts, slacks, shorts, and skirts.
Famous Celebrities in Gaultier
Gaultier produced sculptured costumes for Madonna during the nineties, starting with her infamous cone bra for her 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour, and designed the wardrobe for her 2006 Confessions Tour.
Gaultier has designed some of the costumes and outfits worn by rocker Marilyn Manson, including for his The Golden Age of Grotesque album.
In France, the costumes he designed for singer Maylene Farmer gained much attention. In spring 2008 he signed a contract to be the fashion designer for her tour in 2009. He designed a dress that Kerry Washington wore at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.
In 2008, he designed the white and silver mermaid dress that Marion Cotillard wore at the 80th Academy Awards, when she won the Oscar for her performance in La Vie en Rose.
He has designed many other red carpet outfits for artists such as Lady Gaga (VMAs red carpet, 2009), Rihanna (Grammys red carpet, 2011) and Beyoncé(“Run The World (Girls)” music video, 2011). His designs have also been wornby Nicki Minaj in numerous occasions.
He designed the costumes for Kylie Minogue’s international KylieX2008 tour, as well as Hong Kong singer Leslie Cheung, who hired Gaultier to design eight costumes for his last concert tour in 2000.
Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, Fergie, Sonam Kapoor, Coco Rocha, Dita von Teese and Camila Belle have also worn his designs throughout the years.
In 2013, he designed the couture dress piece Rihanna wore at the American Music Awards. Her outfit sparked a lot of controversy, and many websites named her one of the best dressed of the night.
Kim Kardashian wore one of his designs on the Grammys red carpet in 2015.
In 2016, he designed more than 500 costumes for the revue THE ONE Grand Show at Friedrichstadt-Palast Berlin.
He also designed the dress Katy Perry wore at a Vanity Fair after-party in early 2017.
In 2017, he designed a dress that Solange Knowles wore to the 2017 Glamour Women of the Year Awards in New York City. This dress was a part of the Jean-Paul Gaultier Fall 2017 couture collection.
Exhibition
The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier, From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk started its course of display in 2011. Travelling to more than 1o cities around the world, namely, Montreal, Dallas, San Francisco, Madrid, Rotterdam, Stockholm, Brooklyn, London, Melbourne, Paris and Munich. In Paris, the exhibition was on display at the Grand Palais. It was the first exhibition the Grand Palais has ever devoted to a fashion designer, and marked something of a homecoming for Gaultier; the designer staged his first ever fashion show at the Grand Palais’s Palais de la Découverte back in October 1976.
Current Situation
Jean Paul Gaultier is the sole head of the eponymous label and since 2014, operating only the couture segment. The most recent of the collection was Spring/Summer 2018 presented earlier this year by Gaultier. The show was a tribute to Gaultier’s long-time friend and mentor Pierre Cardin. The opening look—curvy Op Art tunic over a miniskirt, one leg clad in black hose, the other in white—might have been Peggy Moffitt revival, but it was all over in the blink of a false eyelashed eye. The predominance of black and white—highlighted with a few outfits in Day-Glo colours—was used for looks that were more akin to Chachki’s ensemble, with ’40s jackets in molded black leather or rose gold silk. There was fringe in abundance, too—there’s been so much swish and swing these past few days—on some very bright dresses. But it looked best when the fringe, all 1,500 meters of it, was suspended from the sleeves of a perfect double-breasted tux and strung all over the matching trousers. Pierre Cardin who inspired much of the graphic looks of the collection as Gaultier and Cardin go way back and share a great relationship was among the guests at the show. “It was superb,” said Cardin of the show, who is rarely caught in the front row. “I haven’t seen all his shows, but this one won me over completely with its creativity, its originality, with no vulgarity at all.” And he wasn’t the only designer there, incidentally; former Gaultier design assistant Nicolas Ghesquière was also in attendance.
McGrath 1966
