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Mannikin
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LONDON Queen Victoria stares haughtily from the plinth at Jean Paul Gaultier, as if about to pronounce her immortal words: "We are not amused." The sight of French fashion's iconic bad boy staging a retrospective in her museum must be giving Victoria the vapors.
.
Gaultier offers her marble majesty the same charming, mischievous smile he has bestowed on autograph hunters, well-wishers and the organizers of the "Fashion in Motion" event that animated the Victoria Albert Museum last week. It brought 2,000 people to see the five runway shows, staged in the gloomy splendor of the Raphael Cartoon Gallery.
.
Gaultier smiles a lot - his angelic face beaming under a medieval thatch of bottle-blond hair - as he rattles off answers to students.
.
"How can we say what is for a man or a woman?" he asks when questioned about famously having dressed men in skirts. "I am an enfant terrible, but my face is too old to be enfant!"
.
Fashion's king of gender-bending, Gaultier has a lot to smile about. Last month, Hermès made him creative director of its $1 billion empire. So he has now become part of a select band, led by Karl Lagerfeld and Tom Ford, who have the talent to create fashion to the power of two. Hermès has a 35 percent stake in Gaultier's own house, which he founded 25 years ago, but the new responsibilities (and his move into haute couture) show that the designer has become the towering survivor of 1980s fashion.
.
Ah! Those androgynous '80s! Gaultier shaped them into conical breasts that seemed even more joyously incongruous in the museum retrospective than when thrust forward by Madonna. Yet the outfits of the "man as sex object" - as the designer calls his trouser/skirts (1984) and tattoo prints (1994) - now seem prescient. Two decades later, the defining barriers of gender are down and man's "feminine" side has become part of the David Beckham fashion universe.
.
Gaultier could be talking of himself when he says of Madonna, "She had something to say and always did it in an intelligent way." Their shared mission - and not just in his costumes for the 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour - was to show a powerful new woman who was not "an object of desire" but "arrogant, active."
.
"But for me it was about the spirit of the modern woman - the way that the clothes were worn," says Gaultier, speaking in rapid-fire French. "When I designed a dress falling off the shoulders in 1979, it was because I would watch girls pulling their sweater down to give just a glimpse of a bra strap."
.
Enter the visible bra. Was it really back in 1981 that Gaultier introduced underwear as fashion with the flesh-pink corset dress that opened his retrospective show? (The peacock male got his corset in 1985.) For the designer, a fascination with underwear goes back to his 1950s childhood, when he watched his grandmother, a nurse, give massages at home to half-dressed clients and when he rummaged in her closets as she dealt Tarot cards, marveling over the mechanics of her corsetry and hats trimmed with bird-of-paradise feathers.
.
They stalked the runway as the parrot bolero worn by Dana International, the winner of the 1997 Eurovision Song contest, just as his grandmother's nude chiffon lingerie and the claret hosiery worn by his mother in the 1960s became the fetish colors of his collections.
.
Such pure, fashion artistry, springing from a personal wellspring of creativity, is rare in the fashion world and explains why Gaultier, at 51, is up there among the greats - although he would be the last to suggest it. He has a good word for everyone. Working on a new film with the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar (after doing the costumes for "Kika" in 1994), its 1980s setting has made him look back in admiration at the work of Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana, his competitors at the time. (Both are now more or less out of business). Gaultier modestly denies dominance over that period, citing Azzedine Alaia and Comme des Garçons as important fashion figures.
.
In a two-hour conversation, Gaultier utters not one mean phrase. He praises his mentor, Pierre Cardin, who gave him his opportunity to escape from a dream world of fashion magazines into a studio; André Courrèges, whom he calls "a total revolutionary, he changed women, he made them gamine, sporty, active - he invented the architecture of minimalism"; Boy George, for his multicultural and multi-ethnic persona.
.
Even Martin Margiela, his one-time protégé, from whom Gaultier takes over at Hermès, receives generous praise. His only enduring sadness is that in 1990 he lost to AIDS his partner, Francis Menuge, with whom he founded his house.
.
Maybe because Gaultier never takes himself solemnly, the fashion world - especially in America - has had a problem taking him seriously, even though he dressed Nicole Kidman for the 2003 Oscars and his fragrance, shaped as a corseted torso, is a best seller.
.
When he launched couture in 1997, the French establishment finally embraced him, and Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint Laurent's partner, even described Gaultier as the true YSL successor. But the designer says: "I never had any kind of proposition from the house." He was hurt not to be considered as a suitable candidate at Dior, before John Galliano was appointed. (Bernard Arnault supposedly reacted against the camp image of Gaultier's Eurotrash television show with Antoine de Caunes in the 1990s.)
.
Yet here is a designer whose oeuvre proves him to have not just a vivid imagination but an exceptional cultural reach, while retaining a certain perverse, Parisian ideal of elegance. Show themes have included existentialists (1982), Dadaists, for the deconstructed 1983 underwear; Toulouse-Lautrec and the French cancan (1991), and the shock-provoking Chic Rabbis of 1993.
.
Perhaps Gaultier's "sin" is to have brought the street to the podium like no other designer, except Vivienne Westwood. The V&A show proved how Gaultier followed the threads of popular style, incorporating denim, from a male patchwork of jeans and fishnet through a vintage corset morphing into a denim-blue feathered hemline. Other streetwise wit has included biker leathers, sailor sweaters, jump suits and rapper gear.
.
With some irony, Gaultier is now exploring the salons that his designer generation once challenged. The techniques of haute couture emphasize the rigor that was previously lost under the fake snow of Eskimo inspiration (1994) or the Mexican market setting of Frida Kahlo style (1997). In the museum, stripped of any gimmicks, the clothes could be seen in all their inventive genius. No wonder the public sent out a roar of approval loud enough to shake Queen Victoria's bust from its stand.
.
International Herald Tribune LONDON Queen Victoria stares haughtily from the plinth at Jean Paul Gaultier, as if about to pronounce her immortal words: "We are not amused." The sight of French fashion's iconic bad boy staging a retrospective in her museum must be giving Victoria the vapors.
.
Gaultier offers her marble majesty the same charming, mischievous smile he has bestowed on autograph hunters, well-wishers and the organizers of the "Fashion in Motion" event that animated the Victoria Albert Museum last week. It brought 2,000 people to see the five runway shows, staged in the gloomy splendor of the Raphael Cartoon Gallery.
.
Gaultier smiles a lot - his angelic face beaming under a medieval thatch of bottle-blond hair - as he rattles off answers to students.
.
"How can we say what is for a man or a woman?" he asks when questioned about famously having dressed men in skirts. "I am an enfant terrible, but my face is too old to be enfant!"
.
Fashion's king of gender-bending, Gaultier has a lot to smile about. Last month, Hermès made him creative director of its $1 billion empire. So he has now become part of a select band, led by Karl Lagerfeld and Tom Ford, who have the talent to create fashion to the power of two. Hermès has a 35 percent stake in Gaultier's own house, which he founded 25 years ago, but the new responsibilities (and his move into haute couture) show that the designer has become the towering survivor of 1980s fashion.
.
Ah! Those androgynous '80s! Gaultier shaped them into conical breasts that seemed even more joyously incongruous in the museum retrospective than when thrust forward by Madonna. Yet the outfits of the "man as sex object" - as the designer calls his trouser/skirts (1984) and tattoo prints (1994) - now seem prescient. Two decades later, the defining barriers of gender are down and man's "feminine" side has become part of the David Beckham fashion universe.
.
Gaultier could be talking of himself when he says of Madonna, "She had something to say and always did it in an intelligent way." Their shared mission - and not just in his costumes for the 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour - was to show a powerful new woman who was not "an object of desire" but "arrogant, active."
.
"But for me it was about the spirit of the modern woman - the way that the clothes were worn," says Gaultier, speaking in rapid-fire French. "When I designed a dress falling off the shoulders in 1979, it was because I would watch girls pulling their sweater down to give just a glimpse of a bra strap."
.
Enter the visible bra. Was it really back in 1981 that Gaultier introduced underwear as fashion with the flesh-pink corset dress that opened his retrospective show? (The peacock male got his corset in 1985.) For the designer, a fascination with underwear goes back to his 1950s childhood, when he watched his grandmother, a nurse, give massages at home to half-dressed clients and when he rummaged in her closets as she dealt Tarot cards, marveling over the mechanics of her corsetry and hats trimmed with bird-of-paradise feathers.
.
They stalked the runway as the parrot bolero worn by Dana International, the winner of the 1997 Eurovision Song contest, just as his grandmother's nude chiffon lingerie and the claret hosiery worn by his mother in the 1960s became the fetish colors of his collections.
.
Such pure, fashion artistry, springing from a personal wellspring of creativity, is rare in the fashion world and explains why Gaultier, at 51, is up there among the greats - although he would be the last to suggest it. He has a good word for everyone. Working on a new film with the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar (after doing the costumes for "Kika" in 1994), its 1980s setting has made him look back in admiration at the work of Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana, his competitors at the time. (Both are now more or less out of business). Gaultier modestly denies dominance over that period, citing Azzedine Alaia and Comme des Garçons as important fashion figures.
.
In a two-hour conversation, Gaultier utters not one mean phrase. He praises his mentor, Pierre Cardin, who gave him his opportunity to escape from a dream world of fashion magazines into a studio; André Courrèges, whom he calls "a total revolutionary, he changed women, he made them gamine, sporty, active - he invented the architecture of minimalism"; Boy George, for his multicultural and multi-ethnic persona.
.
Even Martin Margiela, his one-time protégé, from whom Gaultier takes over at Hermès, receives generous praise. His only enduring sadness is that in 1990 he lost to AIDS his partner, Francis Menuge, with whom he founded his house.
.
Maybe because Gaultier never takes himself solemnly, the fashion world - especially in America - has had a problem taking him seriously, even though he dressed Nicole Kidman for the 2003 Oscars and his fragrance, shaped as a corseted torso, is a best seller.
.
When he launched couture in 1997, the French establishment finally embraced him, and Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint Laurent's partner, even described Gaultier as the true YSL successor. But the designer says: "I never had any kind of proposition from the house." He was hurt not to be considered as a suitable candidate at Dior, before John Galliano was appointed. (Bernard Arnault supposedly reacted against the camp image of Gaultier's Eurotrash television show with Antoine de Caunes in the 1990s.)
.
Yet here is a designer whose oeuvre proves him to have not just a vivid imagination but an exceptional cultural reach, while retaining a certain perverse, Parisian ideal of elegance. Show themes have included existentialists (1982), Dadaists, for the deconstructed 1983 underwear; Toulouse-Lautrec and the French cancan (1991), and the shock-provoking Chic Rabbis of 1993.
.
Perhaps Gaultier's "sin" is to have brought the street to the podium like no other designer, except Vivienne Westwood. The V&A show proved how Gaultier followed the threads of popular style, incorporating denim, from a male patchwork of jeans and fishnet through a vintage corset morphing into a denim-blue feathered hemline. Other streetwise wit has included biker leathers, sailor sweaters, jump suits and rapper gear.
.
With some irony, Gaultier is now exploring the salons that his designer generation once challenged. The techniques of haute couture emphasize the rigor that was previously lost under the fake snow of Eskimo inspiration (1994) or the Mexican market setting of Frida Kahlo style (1997). In the museum, stripped of any gimmicks, the clothes could be seen in all their inventive genius. No wonder the public sent out a roar of approval loud enough to shake Queen Victoria's bust from its stand.
.
International Herald Tribune LONDON Queen Victoria stares haughtily from the plinth at Jean Paul Gaultier, as if about to pronounce her immortal words: "We are not amused." The sight of French fashion's iconic bad boy staging a retrospective in her museum must be giving Victoria the vapors.
.
Gaultier offers her marble majesty the same charming, mischievous smile he has bestowed on autograph hunters, well-wishers and the organizers of the "Fashion in Motion" event that animated the Victoria Albert Museum last week. It brought 2,000 people to see the five runway shows, staged in the gloomy splendor of the Raphael Cartoon Gallery.
.
Gaultier smiles a lot - his angelic face beaming under a medieval thatch of bottle-blond hair - as he rattles off answers to students.
.
"How can we say what is for a man or a woman?" he asks when questioned about famously having dressed men in skirts. "I am an enfant terrible, but my face is too old to be enfant!"
.
Fashion's king of gender-bending, Gaultier has a lot to smile about. Last month, Hermès made him creative director of its $1 billion empire. So he has now become part of a select band, led by Karl Lagerfeld and Tom Ford, who have the talent to create fashion to the power of two. Hermès has a 35 percent stake in Gaultier's own house, which he founded 25 years ago, but the new responsibilities (and his move into haute couture) show that the designer has become the towering survivor of 1980s fashion.
.
Ah! Those androgynous '80s! Gaultier shaped them into conical breasts that seemed even more joyously incongruous in the museum retrospective than when thrust forward by Madonna. Yet the outfits of the "man as sex object" - as the designer calls his trouser/skirts (1984) and tattoo prints (1994) - now seem prescient. Two decades later, the defining barriers of gender are down and man's "feminine" side has become part of the David Beckham fashion universe.
.
Gaultier could be talking of himself when he says of Madonna, "She had something to say and always did it in an intelligent way." Their shared mission - and not just in his costumes for the 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour - was to show a powerful new woman who was not "an object of desire" but "arrogant, active."
.
"But for me it was about the spirit of the modern woman - the way that the clothes were worn," says Gaultier, speaking in rapid-fire French. "When I designed a dress falling off the shoulders in 1979, it was because I would watch girls pulling their sweater down to give just a glimpse of a bra strap."
.
Enter the visible bra. Was it really back in 1981 that Gaultier introduced underwear as fashion with the flesh-pink corset dress that opened his retrospective show? (The peacock male got his corset in 1985.) For the designer, a fascination with underwear goes back to his 1950s childhood, when he watched his grandmother, a nurse, give massages at home to half-dressed clients and when he rummaged in her closets as she dealt Tarot cards, marveling over the mechanics of her corsetry and hats trimmed with bird-of-paradise feathers.
.
They stalked the runway as the parrot bolero worn by Dana International, the winner of the 1997 Eurovision Song contest, just as his grandmother's nude chiffon lingerie and the claret hosiery worn by his mother in the 1960s became the fetish colors of his collections.
.
Such pure, fashion artistry, springing from a personal wellspring of creativity, is rare in the fashion world and explains why Gaultier, at 51, is up there among the greats - although he would be the last to suggest it. He has a good word for everyone. Working on a new film with the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar (after doing the costumes for "Kika" in 1994), its 1980s setting has made him look back in admiration at the work of Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana, his competitors at the time. (Both are now more or less out of business). Gaultier modestly denies dominance over that period, citing Azzedine Alaia and Comme des Garçons as important fashion figures.
.
In a two-hour conversation, Gaultier utters not one mean phrase. He praises his mentor, Pierre Cardin, who gave him his opportunity to escape from a dream world of fashion magazines into a studio; André Courrèges, whom he calls "a total revolutionary, he changed women, he made them gamine, sporty, active - he invented the architecture of minimalism"; Boy George, for his multicultural and multi-ethnic persona.
.
Even Martin Margiela, his one-time protégé, from whom Gaultier takes over at Hermès, receives generous praise. His only enduring sadness is that in 1990 he lost to AIDS his partner, Francis Menuge, with whom he founded his house.
.
Maybe because Gaultier never takes himself solemnly, the fashion world - especially in America - has had a problem taking him seriously, even though he dressed Nicole Kidman for the 2003 Oscars and his fragrance, shaped as a corseted torso, is a best seller.
.
When he launched couture in 1997, the French establishment finally embraced him, and Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint Laurent's partner, even described Gaultier as the true YSL successor. But the designer says: "I never had any kind of proposition from the house." He was hurt not to be considered as a suitable candidate at Dior, before John Galliano was appointed. (Bernard Arnault supposedly reacted against the camp image of Gaultier's Eurotrash television show with Antoine de Caunes in the 1990s.)
.
Yet here is a designer whose oeuvre proves him to have not just a vivid imagination but an exceptional cultural reach, while retaining a certain perverse, Parisian ideal of elegance. Show themes have included existentialists (1982), Dadaists, for the deconstructed 1983 underwear; Toulouse-Lautrec and the French cancan (1991), and the shock-provoking Chic Rabbis of 1993.
.
Perhaps Gaultier's "sin" is to have brought the street to the podium like no other designer, except Vivienne Westwood. The V&A show proved how Gaultier followed the threads of popular style, incorporating denim, from a male patchwork of jeans and fishnet through a vintage corset morphing into a denim-blue feathered hemline. Other streetwise wit has included biker leathers, sailor sweaters, jump suits and rapper gear.
.
With some irony, Gaultier is now exploring the salons that his designer generation once challenged. The techniques of haute couture emphasize the rigor that was previously lost under the fake snow of Eskimo inspiration (1994) or the Mexican market setting of Frida Kahlo style (1997). In the museum, stripped of any gimmicks, the clothes could be seen in all their inventive genius. No wonder the public sent out a roar of approval loud enough to shake Queen Victoria's bust from its stand.
.
International Herald Tribune
No visuals from the musuem though,
i never got to see it but i wanted to! 
im jelouse post pics now!!!!!!
