Jean Paul Gaultier museum exhibition opens in San Francisco. Jean Paul Gaultier's "Dolorès" gown from the spring-summer… (Patrice Stable / Jean Paul…) Reporting from San Francisco — — Talking mannequins with video-animated faces, men in skirts, sweat-stained corsets worn by Madonna and a child's teddy bear that started it all. Get ready for another museum fashion blockbuster. "The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk" opened Saturday at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. The exhibition, which runs through Aug. 19, spotlights almost four decades of the French designer's collections that pushed the boundaries of gender, sexuality, multiculturalism and good taste — all in the name of promoting diversity — and inspired a generation of enfants terribles (Alexander McQueen, John Galliano and Martin Margiela) along the way.
Curated by Thierry-Maxime Loriot, the exhibition is organized thematically, with sections devoted to the boudoir, the body and the urban jungle. "For me, elegance is not just clothes. Jean Paul Gaultier speaks to Virginia Trioli. Jean Paul Gaultier In Conversation. An Interview With Jean Paul Gaultier - Video. Ooh La La: Jean Paul Gaultier interview | Dazed. For more than 30 years Jean Paul Gaultier has been one of the world’s most influential and inventive designers. From codpieces and skirts for men and underwear as outerwear to androgynous women on the catwalk teasing and transcending the boundaries of gender and stereotyped images of femininity and beauty, Gaultier has firmly established himself as a fashion force for social transgression.
Who else could introduce fetish, bondage, rubber and PVC to haute couture and get away with it? His designs brought high fashion to the high street and took street style to the catwalk, in a seductive fusion of the traditional and the radical. He is associated in the public’s mind with two of the most famous items in fashion iconography: the Breton sailor top, and a pointy cone bra that could take your eye out.
You said that on your 60th birthday last year you would stay in bed and cry rather than celebrate. Do you think you're ageing gracefully? What do you do to get away from the fashion circus? L'Enfant Eternel. Photo Collages by Damien Blottiere Jean Paul Gaultier knows how he will spend his 60th birthday in April. “I will stay in my bed,” he says, affecting a theatrically glum expression, folding down his bottom lip. “Crying.” It may provide a moment of philosophical reflection for the designer, on the nickname that has shadowed him since he took his uniquely countercultural and unapologetically gay eye and sold it directly to the heart of high fashion.
“I will say, ‘Ah, no longer the enfant terrible! I wait for the designer on the second-floor suite of his Paris atelier, which is up a comically grand, baroque stairwell, surrounded by lonely mannequins, mirrored partitions, and frescoes of his latest campaign imagery -- a Sistine Chapel of canary-yellow corsetry. There is nothing subtle about Gaultier: His gestures are roomy, his accent drunk on its own Gallic extravagance, like somebody doing an impression of a Frenchman.
SLIDESHOW: Exclusive Gaultier Looks From 1990 to Today. Jean-Paul Gaultier interview. Celia Walden talks to Jean-Paul Gaultier, the enfant terrible of the Fashion world, about his beginnings and life, and what the future holds for him. BY Celia Walden | 08 December 2010 'It’s the designer’s sense of the absurd that’s perhaps most un-Gallic about Gaultier, one of the only Frenchmen I’ve met who sees the point of Monty Python' Photo: ANDREW CROWLEY When Jean-Paul Gaultier was seven years old, he would dress up his teddy bear in a series of outlandish outfits.
"The first coned-shaped bra I made was for that bear," he says, his unserious, seriously clever face breaking into a smile. "The poor thing went through a lot. When the Duchess of Kent got married and Queen Fabiola of Belgium, he had to wear wedding dresses. - Watch the Jean Paul Gaultier spring/summer 2011 catwalk show - In pictures: EJAF Winter Ball hosted by Jean Paul Gaultier - Jean Paul Gaultier's iconic advertising campaigns Then the first time open heart surgery was performed, he had to undergo that too. " ! The Utopian Vision of Jean Paul Gaultier. Ad campaign for Jean Paul Gaultier’s “Elegance Contest” and “Casanova at the Gym” women’s and men’s ready-to-wear spring-summer collections of 1992. Art direction and photography by Gaultier. (© Jean Paul Gaultier) It’s a reasonable assumption to make that a man who was dubbed the enfant terrible of fashion early on in his career forges styles with shock value at the forefront.
Though his collections always warrant a raised over-waxed eyebrow from show attendees, Jean Paul Gaultier’s work, much like fashion at large, can at times only be superficially consumed rather than analyzed on a deeper level. Sailor stripes, corsets, and men’s skirts are not just the cheeky trademarks of a brilliant designer, but tools for a deeper excavation of culture. Seeing it all curated together, the breadth of his work can quixotically be described as evincing a utopian vision — not just of fashion, but of society. Andy Warhol (American, 1928–1987). Jean Paul Gaultier (French, b. 1952). April 3, 2012. Jean Paul Gaultier’s Fantasyland - The New Yorker. 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. Gaultier’s father was an accountant and his mother a clerk; he was an only child. Jean Paul Gaultier - Wonderland Magazine. April 23rd, 2009 Jean Paul Gaultier has come a long way since his schooldays as a granny’s boy with no friends and a penchant for ladies in fish-nets.
Ben Cobb does lunch with the king of French fashion and asks him how he first fell in love with la mode… Rue St Martin, Paris. On the fourth floor of Gaultier HQ, the glossy Marlboro-red lift opens onto a private galley kitchen. A chef in small spectacles and a black-and-white chequered apron is busy preparing lunch on the stainless steel worktop. He smiles and shows me through to an adjoining white room; at the end of a long linen-covered table is a glass wall overlooking a giant concrete atrium.
Moments later the lift doors part again and the unmistakable voice – that Pepé Le Pew cartoon French accent – of Jean Paul Gaultier booms around the space: “Bonjour!” Not many fashion designers become household names. Even away from the catwalk, Gaultier could never be called a shrinking violet. Gaultier hasn’t changed much. “C’est bon!” Jean Paul Gaultier reveals why fashion designers wear black - 22/10/2014. Jean Paul Gaultier reveals why fashion designers wear black Australian Broadcasting Corporation Broadcast: 22/10/2014 Reporter: Leigh Sales Fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier gave Madonna her trend-setting late 1980s look of corsets and cone bras but reveals why he himself wears all black.
Transcript LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Even if you think you don't know anything about fashion, you probably would recognise the work of the iconic French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier. He was the man behind Madonna's trend-setting look in the late 1980s - the cone bras and the corsets that helped turn her from just another pop star into a defining cultural sensation. Jean-Paul Gaultier is currently in Australia to open an exhibition of his garments at the National Gallery of Victoria. Jean-Paul, congratulations on this exhibition. JEAN-PAUL GAULTIER, FASHION DESIGNER: Thank you very much. LEIGH SALES: It must bring back a lot of memories when you see all of these designs together? JEAN-PAUL GAULTIER: Yeah.
NGV > The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier. “The costumes Jean Paul Gaultier designs are wonderfully beautiful and absolutely 'conceptual' at the same time. Almost no one else is able to combine both in the same garment. ” - Pedro AlmodovarAs a child during the television era, fascinated by movies and variety shows, Jean Paul Gaultier absorbed culture through the lens of the small screen. Fashion interested him only insofar as he could turn it into spectacle. He saw runway shows as happenings, trips to special worlds of his devising, with their own original soundtracks, decors and unusual casting choices. As the co-host of the program Eurotrash, he was the first fashion designer to become a television star. That new status as a media darling coincided with the rise of fashion as a powerful form of expression in an image-obsessed society. Beginning in the late 1970s, Gaultier borrowed from the realms of science fiction and the emerging sounds of new wave and house music.