Monday, August 29, 2005
Rebel with a corset
Jean Paul Gaultier is running late, so his right-hand man, Lionel Vermeil, offers me a glass of water and leads me into an almost empty room. In the centre, two oval-backed Perspex chairs face each other at a transparent table. The effect is somewhere between Sixties modern, Louis Quinze and state penitentiary.
Moments later, Lionel returns. Perhaps, he suggests, I'd like to cast my eye over this while I'm waiting. He waves a few sheets of paper at me with practised indifference. 'It's something I wrote about Jean Paul,' he shrugs. 'It's my vision of him.'
Lionel has worked with Gaultier for 20 years. He used to operate the lifts at the Eiffel Tower, then he saw Gaultier on TV and decided to come and work for him instead. This career move is so perfectly pitched to Gaultier's aesthetic - in which Parisian cliches are reworked into avant-garde yet media-friendly fashion statements - that you wonder if the two of them haven't conspired to make it up.
'You might find it's a bit too psychoanalytic,' says Lionel, as I begin to read his work. Lionel, it turns out, has been in Lacanian analysis, and feels it gives him insights into the personalities of others. Without hesitation, he goes on to inform me that Jean Paul Gaultier has always wanted to remain a child. His grandmother adored him - 'Too much, in my view,' he adds, cupping a hand around his mouth unnecessarily - and ever since he went to school, where boys and girls were separated, Gaultier has been in search of love. The best way to get on with him, says Lionel, is simply 'to be human and to listen'. He treats his employees like family ('which can be a bit of a trap'), and this means that if Gaultier gets upset about something, he stores it up and up until it explodes, because he so wants to be loved that he's afraid of saying anything. I'll see what an overgrown child he is, Lionel sniffs, when he traipses in with his rucksack.
By now, I am hoping that Gaultier won't turn up at all, and that I'll be able to write about him based purely on the indiscretions of his in-house therapist. But after 40 minutes or so we hear he is in the building. I wander down into the main hallway of the former theatre that has been Gaultier's HQ for the past year, and as I gaze up its extravagant stairway, a small bleachedblond head pops over the balustrade, grinning.
At 53, and about to celebrate 30 years of his ready-to-wear label, the designer still has trouble shaking off the epithet of 'enfant terrible'. He is the industry's longest-serving rebel. But he also, paradoxically, has become Paris's most triumphant couturier - he now closes couture week, having inherited that coveted spot from his retired hero, Yves Saint Laurent, and is seen by many as Saint Laurent's successor.
Even without Lionel's helpful hints, it might be possible to surmise that Gaultier had based his entire persona on some forgotten French cartoon character of the post-war period. (In fact, he once published an autobiographical book made up of cartoons.) He is speedy, in his actions as in his speech, he smiles unstintingly, and he gives the impression that there is no form of silliness he wouldn't be happy to embrace.
Back in the Perspex penitentiary, I ask if he ever aimed to shock.
'No,' he reflects. 'I don't think I was ever concerned with shocking people. Was I conscious of the fact that it could be shocking? Yes. But I just wanted to show what I found fair or normal or beautiful. If anything, I was the one who was shocked, by certain kinds of intolerance.'
Gaultier first encountered intolerance as a teenager, when he went to work for Jean Patou. (He had been hired by Pierre Cardin on his 18th birthday, and moved on to Patou after that.) 'There were very precise dress codes,' he says. 'Like: everything that is beige and gold is beautiful and chic. Of course there were often people dressed in beige and gold who were total monstrosities - it was absurd! The shop assistants at Patou would be indignant when I'd walk in wearing riding boots, even though I wasn't going riding. They'd say you couldn't use black models because American clients didn't like it - things like that used to shock me. When I started my own collection I thought, "I'm going to trample all over those barriers."'
The trampling wasn't indiscriminate. According to Lionel, 'If something is a tradition, he doesn't touch it. If it's a convention, he pulverizes it.' For example, the traditional slippery lining in jacket sleeves (a 'mignonette') is kept, because it serves a purpose - it makes the jacket easier to slide on. But the fact that women's and men's jackets cross over in opposite directions is a convention which was born because men needed to access their wallets in order to pay for dinner, whereas women, it was thought, did not. Once Gaultier realised this, he crushed the convention by reversing the directions.
This is perhaps Gaultier's defining trait - and his most misunderstood: it is because he adores fashion's dying traditions that he seeks to revive them through his puckish reworkings. He never does anything, he claims, for the political sake of it. Though he made a bra for his teddy when he was 13, and became famous for putting men in skirts, he soon realised that, anatomically speaking, a bra for men was ridiculous. Putting a skirt on a man is not a travesty,' he has said. 'Putting a bra on him is.'
Gaultier has based entire collections on the attire of Hasidic Jews, or the seal skins of Inuits. He has created extraordinary one-offs, like a bolero made of feathers in primary colours or a strapless leopard-skin dress, in which the bodice is the animal's flattened head. There were the legendary torpedo corsets that pierced through men's suits on Madonna's Blonde Ambition tour. Yet no matter how outre the outfit, Gaultier claims only to have been reflecting a change that was already taking place in society'.
An early influence was the Sixties designer Andre Courreges, whom he once saw on TV. Instead of talking about clothes, the way others used to,' Gaultier explains, 'he talked about an active woman: who drove her own car, who worked, who ran, and who was alive. And suddenly thought, "My God, that's incredible." It was about human beings, and extremely modern.'
Gaultier has always 'preferred the company of women to that of men'. (Young men are another matter - Gaultier has been out since his early teens, and has said it was while reading Romeo and Juliet that he realised he was more interested in Romeo.) He believes that women are 'quite frankly more intelligent than men, perhaps because have to think more in order to get what they want, because the world is run by machos'.
Gaultier grew up in a suburb of Paris, and the only child of a book-keeper and a secretary he spent a good deal of time with his maternal grandmother, a nurse, beautician faith healer rolled into one. She would read her female clients' tarot cards and advise them on new hairstyles, while her grandson drew pictures of them.
'I'd do "before and after" portraits them,' Gaultier remembers. '"After" would what I'd seen on TV - Ava Gardner or whoever. And I'd listen to my grandmother's advice they'd be having problems with their husband and she would tell them to dress differently. I learned what you could do through clothes, and I learned about the psychology of human beings - that fashion is about people's desires, however unformulated.'
Gaultier's grandmother had a closet full corsets (she told him that she used to drink a swig of vinegar before putting one on, so her stomach would contract and the laces could be pulled even tighter). A widow, she dressed entirely in black, and once forgot to put her skirt on over her slip, so that she found herself in the middle of the street wearing lingerie. These details are what Lionel calls the 'sartorial incidents' of Gaultier's life, as if his childhood were an accident or crime scene littered with clues to his future creations.
For better and for worse, 1990 was a turning point for Gaultier. His lover and business partner, Francis Menuge, died of Aids, and while Menuge was very ill, Gaultier was asked to do the costumes for Madonna's Blonde Ambition tour. These are hardly equivalent events, and Gaultier quite rightly corrects me for equating the two: 'The sadness of the death of Francis Menuge had nothing to do with the joy of Madonna. They happened in the same year, but it wasn't that working with Madonna was what helped me to survive.' Still, he admits, when Menuge died he thought he would give up and, coincidentally, that was the moment when his fame took on a much-hyped new layer. He became forever connected in people's minds to the person who, he says, 'really represented that free-willed, decisive and liberated woman who still played the game of femininity while being so strong she was almost macho'.
Gaultier says he would never have set up on his own had it not been for Menuge: 'I wanted to be a designer, but I would have been happy without my own label.' But Menuge gave him confidence, and ran the business for half of its 30-year existence. 'It was like the baby we had together,' Gaultier says now. 'That's why, for the show after he died, I wrote: "1+1=1; Francis et Jean Paul = Jean Paul Gaultier." It was symbolic. When he died, I thought I'd done what I wanted - even beyond what I'd imagined was possible. I hadn't anticipated my own fame, which can have its bad side but, I have to say, wasn't unpleasant. And so I did think, after all, "Why carry on? Maybe it's best if I stop now." But it's the only thing I know how to do.'
Since then, he has designed costumes for the films of Peter Greenaway, Luc Besson and Pedro Almodovar, he has worked in theatre, and last year he took over the reins at Hermes. He also designs a range for the mass-market catalogue La Redoute. What with his perfume and make-up and menswear, Gaultier works on nine lines at once. He is the sleepless head of an enormous independent company who, by his own admission, doesn't know how to delegate.
Gaultier showed his first couture collection 10 years ago, after being passed over for the top job at Dior - due, he believes, to the camp, self-lampooning antics of his TV series, Eurotrash. There is a mad sort of grandeur about doing couture now, when there are only about 200 clients worldwide, shared by all couturiers, and those clients are dying off fast. The business, which makes a loss, essentially exists as a very expensive advert for perfume, which accounts for half the company's turnover. (When Gaultier's first perfume, the famous bust in a tin can, went on sale at Saks Fifth Avenue, it broke the store's records for a launch.)
Though he readily admits that 'Couture as it used to be is dying,' Gaultier takes that as an opportunity to relish its 'fascinating decadence'. He thinks it has been revived by mavericks such as Galliano and McQueen. You could say that by joining it in its dying days, Gaultier may turn out to be one of fashion's last great auteurs.
In what must once have been the theatre's auditorium, the translucent supermodel Jade Parfitt is being turned back into the bride she played at Gaultier's autumn/winter couture show. She is wearing white hair extensions and slithering into several layers of bleached animal skin. There is an underskirt of sheep's wool, crimped and brushed to look like ostrich feathers, and a delicate dress of devore rabbit. She is a magnificent, towering figure, and adds to the room's Dadaist splendour. White satin jersey lines the walls, sweeping up all the furniture in its web, so that baroque sofas and chairs are pushing through their stretchy wrapping like ghosts wading through ectoplasm.
Parfitt changes for another photograph. This time she is wearing one of the most famous dresses in Gaultier's archives - a skin-coloured corset dress with a torpedo brassiere. Parfitt has been working with Gaultier regularly for the past seven years, and considers him one of the kindest of all designers. Today, he camps it up for the camera, smiling at her, holding his foot up to her back, as if pulling her laces impossibly tight, picking up a hair extension and holding it to his lip, turning himself into an ageing Asterix.
He stops to look at Parfitt while the photographer changes a film. 'That is a 25-year-old dress,' he smiles, 'and it's still alive because of you.'
Marguerite Duras once said of Yves Saint Laurent that he knew what women wanted before they themselves did. In a way, this is what Gaultier hasdone, too. He once knew a girl who wore a bra and liked to show a little bit of strap. He found it more suggestive than no bra at all, so he worked underwear into his clothes. He made dresses that fell off the shoulders, because he saw women allowing their tops to slide off - all these intimate gestures he would expose and turn into ready-made garments. 'It's not my fantasy,' he explains, 'it's about looking, spotting desires and being seduced by those desires themselves.' Fashion, he says, is 'the fruit of evolutions, wars, problems,joys, desires and discoveries', he is merely their 'humble representative'.
Over the years, Gaultier has broken human boundaries as well as dress codes. He has used older models and larger models and women of all races. He has been criticised for staging shows in largely Arab areas of Paris. I ask him if there are colours he doesn't like. 'A colour can't exist until there is someone who wears it and whom it suits. In that sense I like all colours that suit different skin textures.'
He chuckles a little shyly, and adds: 'I can say things with clothes better than I can with words.' But, after thinking for a moment, he arrives at what he meant. 'My raw material isn't fabric,' Gaultier says, 'it's human beings. Voila!'
http://shopping.guardian.co.uk/clothes/story/0,1586,1557720,00.html
Jean Paul Gaultier is running late, so his right-hand man, Lionel Vermeil, offers me a glass of water and leads me into an almost empty room. In the centre, two oval-backed Perspex chairs face each other at a transparent table. The effect is somewhere between Sixties modern, Louis Quinze and state penitentiary.
Moments later, Lionel returns. Perhaps, he suggests, I'd like to cast my eye over this while I'm waiting. He waves a few sheets of paper at me with practised indifference. 'It's something I wrote about Jean Paul,' he shrugs. 'It's my vision of him.'
Lionel has worked with Gaultier for 20 years. He used to operate the lifts at the Eiffel Tower, then he saw Gaultier on TV and decided to come and work for him instead. This career move is so perfectly pitched to Gaultier's aesthetic - in which Parisian cliches are reworked into avant-garde yet media-friendly fashion statements - that you wonder if the two of them haven't conspired to make it up.
'You might find it's a bit too psychoanalytic,' says Lionel, as I begin to read his work. Lionel, it turns out, has been in Lacanian analysis, and feels it gives him insights into the personalities of others. Without hesitation, he goes on to inform me that Jean Paul Gaultier has always wanted to remain a child. His grandmother adored him - 'Too much, in my view,' he adds, cupping a hand around his mouth unnecessarily - and ever since he went to school, where boys and girls were separated, Gaultier has been in search of love. The best way to get on with him, says Lionel, is simply 'to be human and to listen'. He treats his employees like family ('which can be a bit of a trap'), and this means that if Gaultier gets upset about something, he stores it up and up until it explodes, because he so wants to be loved that he's afraid of saying anything. I'll see what an overgrown child he is, Lionel sniffs, when he traipses in with his rucksack.
By now, I am hoping that Gaultier won't turn up at all, and that I'll be able to write about him based purely on the indiscretions of his in-house therapist. But after 40 minutes or so we hear he is in the building. I wander down into the main hallway of the former theatre that has been Gaultier's HQ for the past year, and as I gaze up its extravagant stairway, a small bleachedblond head pops over the balustrade, grinning.
At 53, and about to celebrate 30 years of his ready-to-wear label, the designer still has trouble shaking off the epithet of 'enfant terrible'. He is the industry's longest-serving rebel. But he also, paradoxically, has become Paris's most triumphant couturier - he now closes couture week, having inherited that coveted spot from his retired hero, Yves Saint Laurent, and is seen by many as Saint Laurent's successor.
Even without Lionel's helpful hints, it might be possible to surmise that Gaultier had based his entire persona on some forgotten French cartoon character of the post-war period. (In fact, he once published an autobiographical book made up of cartoons.) He is speedy, in his actions as in his speech, he smiles unstintingly, and he gives the impression that there is no form of silliness he wouldn't be happy to embrace.
Back in the Perspex penitentiary, I ask if he ever aimed to shock.
'No,' he reflects. 'I don't think I was ever concerned with shocking people. Was I conscious of the fact that it could be shocking? Yes. But I just wanted to show what I found fair or normal or beautiful. If anything, I was the one who was shocked, by certain kinds of intolerance.'
Gaultier first encountered intolerance as a teenager, when he went to work for Jean Patou. (He had been hired by Pierre Cardin on his 18th birthday, and moved on to Patou after that.) 'There were very precise dress codes,' he says. 'Like: everything that is beige and gold is beautiful and chic. Of course there were often people dressed in beige and gold who were total monstrosities - it was absurd! The shop assistants at Patou would be indignant when I'd walk in wearing riding boots, even though I wasn't going riding. They'd say you couldn't use black models because American clients didn't like it - things like that used to shock me. When I started my own collection I thought, "I'm going to trample all over those barriers."'
The trampling wasn't indiscriminate. According to Lionel, 'If something is a tradition, he doesn't touch it. If it's a convention, he pulverizes it.' For example, the traditional slippery lining in jacket sleeves (a 'mignonette') is kept, because it serves a purpose - it makes the jacket easier to slide on. But the fact that women's and men's jackets cross over in opposite directions is a convention which was born because men needed to access their wallets in order to pay for dinner, whereas women, it was thought, did not. Once Gaultier realised this, he crushed the convention by reversing the directions.
This is perhaps Gaultier's defining trait - and his most misunderstood: it is because he adores fashion's dying traditions that he seeks to revive them through his puckish reworkings. He never does anything, he claims, for the political sake of it. Though he made a bra for his teddy when he was 13, and became famous for putting men in skirts, he soon realised that, anatomically speaking, a bra for men was ridiculous. Putting a skirt on a man is not a travesty,' he has said. 'Putting a bra on him is.'
Gaultier has based entire collections on the attire of Hasidic Jews, or the seal skins of Inuits. He has created extraordinary one-offs, like a bolero made of feathers in primary colours or a strapless leopard-skin dress, in which the bodice is the animal's flattened head. There were the legendary torpedo corsets that pierced through men's suits on Madonna's Blonde Ambition tour. Yet no matter how outre the outfit, Gaultier claims only to have been reflecting a change that was already taking place in society'.
An early influence was the Sixties designer Andre Courreges, whom he once saw on TV. Instead of talking about clothes, the way others used to,' Gaultier explains, 'he talked about an active woman: who drove her own car, who worked, who ran, and who was alive. And suddenly thought, "My God, that's incredible." It was about human beings, and extremely modern.'
Gaultier has always 'preferred the company of women to that of men'. (Young men are another matter - Gaultier has been out since his early teens, and has said it was while reading Romeo and Juliet that he realised he was more interested in Romeo.) He believes that women are 'quite frankly more intelligent than men, perhaps because have to think more in order to get what they want, because the world is run by machos'.
Gaultier grew up in a suburb of Paris, and the only child of a book-keeper and a secretary he spent a good deal of time with his maternal grandmother, a nurse, beautician faith healer rolled into one. She would read her female clients' tarot cards and advise them on new hairstyles, while her grandson drew pictures of them.
'I'd do "before and after" portraits them,' Gaultier remembers. '"After" would what I'd seen on TV - Ava Gardner or whoever. And I'd listen to my grandmother's advice they'd be having problems with their husband and she would tell them to dress differently. I learned what you could do through clothes, and I learned about the psychology of human beings - that fashion is about people's desires, however unformulated.'
Gaultier's grandmother had a closet full corsets (she told him that she used to drink a swig of vinegar before putting one on, so her stomach would contract and the laces could be pulled even tighter). A widow, she dressed entirely in black, and once forgot to put her skirt on over her slip, so that she found herself in the middle of the street wearing lingerie. These details are what Lionel calls the 'sartorial incidents' of Gaultier's life, as if his childhood were an accident or crime scene littered with clues to his future creations.
For better and for worse, 1990 was a turning point for Gaultier. His lover and business partner, Francis Menuge, died of Aids, and while Menuge was very ill, Gaultier was asked to do the costumes for Madonna's Blonde Ambition tour. These are hardly equivalent events, and Gaultier quite rightly corrects me for equating the two: 'The sadness of the death of Francis Menuge had nothing to do with the joy of Madonna. They happened in the same year, but it wasn't that working with Madonna was what helped me to survive.' Still, he admits, when Menuge died he thought he would give up and, coincidentally, that was the moment when his fame took on a much-hyped new layer. He became forever connected in people's minds to the person who, he says, 'really represented that free-willed, decisive and liberated woman who still played the game of femininity while being so strong she was almost macho'.
Gaultier says he would never have set up on his own had it not been for Menuge: 'I wanted to be a designer, but I would have been happy without my own label.' But Menuge gave him confidence, and ran the business for half of its 30-year existence. 'It was like the baby we had together,' Gaultier says now. 'That's why, for the show after he died, I wrote: "1+1=1; Francis et Jean Paul = Jean Paul Gaultier." It was symbolic. When he died, I thought I'd done what I wanted - even beyond what I'd imagined was possible. I hadn't anticipated my own fame, which can have its bad side but, I have to say, wasn't unpleasant. And so I did think, after all, "Why carry on? Maybe it's best if I stop now." But it's the only thing I know how to do.'
Since then, he has designed costumes for the films of Peter Greenaway, Luc Besson and Pedro Almodovar, he has worked in theatre, and last year he took over the reins at Hermes. He also designs a range for the mass-market catalogue La Redoute. What with his perfume and make-up and menswear, Gaultier works on nine lines at once. He is the sleepless head of an enormous independent company who, by his own admission, doesn't know how to delegate.
Gaultier showed his first couture collection 10 years ago, after being passed over for the top job at Dior - due, he believes, to the camp, self-lampooning antics of his TV series, Eurotrash. There is a mad sort of grandeur about doing couture now, when there are only about 200 clients worldwide, shared by all couturiers, and those clients are dying off fast. The business, which makes a loss, essentially exists as a very expensive advert for perfume, which accounts for half the company's turnover. (When Gaultier's first perfume, the famous bust in a tin can, went on sale at Saks Fifth Avenue, it broke the store's records for a launch.)
Though he readily admits that 'Couture as it used to be is dying,' Gaultier takes that as an opportunity to relish its 'fascinating decadence'. He thinks it has been revived by mavericks such as Galliano and McQueen. You could say that by joining it in its dying days, Gaultier may turn out to be one of fashion's last great auteurs.
In what must once have been the theatre's auditorium, the translucent supermodel Jade Parfitt is being turned back into the bride she played at Gaultier's autumn/winter couture show. She is wearing white hair extensions and slithering into several layers of bleached animal skin. There is an underskirt of sheep's wool, crimped and brushed to look like ostrich feathers, and a delicate dress of devore rabbit. She is a magnificent, towering figure, and adds to the room's Dadaist splendour. White satin jersey lines the walls, sweeping up all the furniture in its web, so that baroque sofas and chairs are pushing through their stretchy wrapping like ghosts wading through ectoplasm.
Parfitt changes for another photograph. This time she is wearing one of the most famous dresses in Gaultier's archives - a skin-coloured corset dress with a torpedo brassiere. Parfitt has been working with Gaultier regularly for the past seven years, and considers him one of the kindest of all designers. Today, he camps it up for the camera, smiling at her, holding his foot up to her back, as if pulling her laces impossibly tight, picking up a hair extension and holding it to his lip, turning himself into an ageing Asterix.
He stops to look at Parfitt while the photographer changes a film. 'That is a 25-year-old dress,' he smiles, 'and it's still alive because of you.'
Marguerite Duras once said of Yves Saint Laurent that he knew what women wanted before they themselves did. In a way, this is what Gaultier hasdone, too. He once knew a girl who wore a bra and liked to show a little bit of strap. He found it more suggestive than no bra at all, so he worked underwear into his clothes. He made dresses that fell off the shoulders, because he saw women allowing their tops to slide off - all these intimate gestures he would expose and turn into ready-made garments. 'It's not my fantasy,' he explains, 'it's about looking, spotting desires and being seduced by those desires themselves.' Fashion, he says, is 'the fruit of evolutions, wars, problems,joys, desires and discoveries', he is merely their 'humble representative'.
Over the years, Gaultier has broken human boundaries as well as dress codes. He has used older models and larger models and women of all races. He has been criticised for staging shows in largely Arab areas of Paris. I ask him if there are colours he doesn't like. 'A colour can't exist until there is someone who wears it and whom it suits. In that sense I like all colours that suit different skin textures.'
He chuckles a little shyly, and adds: 'I can say things with clothes better than I can with words.' But, after thinking for a moment, he arrives at what he meant. 'My raw material isn't fabric,' Gaultier says, 'it's human beings. Voila!'
http://shopping.guardian.co.uk/clothes/story/0,1586,1557720,00.html
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