The Great Fashion Designers (40 page)

The greatest Gaultier shows have been cavalcades, carnivals of the imagination, inspired by an extraordinary host of references, blending couture and street fashion with gay abandon, often presented on models who defy conventional interpretations of beauty. Inspiration has ranged from Jewish rabbis, the Dadaists and Mongolian Inuits to tattoos, sadomasochism and flea markets. At the heart of so many of his shows, however, is an enduring affection for Paris, particularly the Paris of the interwar years. Popping up at the end of the show is the man himself, one of the most instantly recognisable
figures in world fashion, usually in his trademark striped sailor T-shirt, always with an impish grin.

Jean Paul Gaultier was born in 1952 in the suburbs of Paris to hard-working parents, Paul, a bookkeeper, and Solange, a secretary. Marie Garrabe, his grandmother, was the biggest influence on his childhood, allowing the young Gaultier considerable freedom on his weekly visits. In modern-day terminology, she might be described as an alternative therapist, operating from her own home, which was decorated with old-style furnishings. His other childhood influence was television, particularly a documentary about the Folies-Bergère, where the feathers and glitz excited him and were the beginning of his creative and sexual awakening as a gay man. Feigning sickness, he bunked off school to pursue his interest in fashion, looking at newspapers and magazines and drawing obsessively. In his formative years in the 1960s, his interest was in the world of haute couture rather than the new generation of ready-to-wear
créateurs
, although anything the teenage Gaultier learned was self-taught, gleaned from magazines. Gaultier's first dresses were for his mother, an achievement that encouraged him to compile sheaves of drawings to send to would-be employers. At Christian Dior, Marc Bohan showed no interest, but Pierre Cardin offered the eighteen-year-old Gaultier work in 1970. Although he only lasted eight months before becoming a victim of a redundancy round, it was an important period. Cardin served as the perfect mentor for Gaultier for he had an open mind and was developing his innovative L'Espace Pierre Cardin, a theatre and exhibition venue. ‘He told me that everything is possible,' Gaultier recalled years later.

Gaultier then worked briefly at Jacques Esterel and at the Cincept style agency before landing a job at the house of Patou under design director Michel Goma and, later, Angelo Tarlazzi. At Patou, though, he became disillusioned by the straitjacketed formalities of the world of haute couture, which he had previously held in such high esteem. Much of the rest of his career was spent reacting against the restrictions of couture, inspired by visits to London, where he felt energised by the city's creative (and sexual) energy, particularly in the post-Punk period. By 1974, Gaultier was back at Pierre Cardin in a curious position at Cardin-Philippines, part of the designer's fast-growing international empire. Such an experience opened Gaultier's eyes to new cultures and influences, encouraging him to look widely for inspiration in the years that followed. Back in Paris within a year, he made contact with an old school friend, Donald Potard, who introduced him to the fledgling jeweller Francis Menuge, who became his lover. Another important influence was the exotic model Anna Pawlowski. Scraping together funds, the friends produced the first Jean Paul Gaultier collection in October 1976, including a studded leather jacket paired with a tutu—a sign that Gaultier was an unconventional kind of designer.

The early Gaultier collections were characterised by a flood of contrasting designs and ideas, created in circumstances of financial desperation. An initial two-year contract in 1979 with Japan's Kashiyama, thanks to the support of Kashiyama creative director Dominique Emschweiller, set Gaultier on a more professional footing. Simultaneously (and not coincidentally), the press began to take fulsome notice of Gaultier, even if much of the interest was founded on his ability to entertain—he was an oddity, a cult, a cause célèbre. He was ‘Paris's Court Jester', according to
WWD
in 1984. In a prolonged interview with biographer Colin McDowell, Gaultier denied that his intention was to destroy the past. ‘I use and respect tradition, but try to find new elements which will make it younger.' His goal was to question notions of good taste, but founded on the solid base of the tailoring skills he had acquired in the milieu of haute couture.

Gaultier was also keen to break down what he saw as artificial barriers between menswear and womenswear. Why shouldn't men wear skirts? His introduction of men's skirts in 1985 and constant repetition of the theme was no gimmick but was based on a fundamental belief that clothes should not be gender specific. ‘Masculinity is not connected to the clothes you're wearing—it's in the mind,' he said.

The late 1980s saw Gaultier's business expand rapidly, backed by Gibo in Italy and Kashiyama in Japan. The Gaultier aesthetic was well represented in his Paris store in rue Vivienne, blending ancient-look mosaics with his innovative clothes, and in stores
in Milan, London and Brussels. Gaultier's openness about his sexuality and mix-it-up approach to design brought him into the heart of rapidly evolving popular culture, working with photographer Jean-Baptiste Mondino on advertising campaigns and videos, choreographer Régine Chopinot, film directors Peter Greenaway and Pedro Almodovar. The early 1990s were even better for Gaultier, who forged on with growing confidence, despite the personal loss of his partner, Francis Menuge, from Aids in 1990. A commission to design a wardrobe for Madonna's Blonde Ambition tour in 1990 led to the creation of a corset including a conical bra, which Gaultier later chose as the bottle shape for his fragrance, launched in 1993 and packaged in a tin can.

Gaultier has continously challenged mainstream thinking and stirred up controversy, ranging from nuns as strippers in 1991 to a collection shown on black models in 1997 at a time when the French government was clamping down on immigration. His fashion shows have often been spectacles, lavishly mounted in a variety of different locations, paving the way for the imaginative shows staged by designers such as Alexander McQueen and Viktor & Rolf in the noughties. Gaultier's arrival under his own name in the haute couture arena was a long time in coming, despite the infusion of new talent that gave haute couture renewed vigour in the 1990s. His first collection, in January 1996, was shown to no music in a pastiche of the old couture style, but the collection, called the Couture Man, was entirely for men. A women's collection followed a year later.

Gaultier was treated with reverence in French fashion circles into the noughties, although by then many of the barriers he had broken through were no longer considered barriers. His work, it could be argued, was done. Hermès bought a 35 per cent stake in his business in 1999, providing him with a solid foundation for the years ahead. But the pressures of maintaining a couture operation, always a loss-making part of the business, forced Gaultier to make job cuts in 2004. ‘We've run up the stairs two at a time,' said Donald Potard, his long-term business partner and president of the house. ‘Now we need to catch our breath to continue operating all of our activities.' At Hermès, where he was appointed creative director of womenswear in May 2003, he showed that he could adapt to another house's style. Pascale Mussard, artistic director, said: ‘People ask what Gaultier has brought to Hermès but it's not arrogant to consider what Hermès brought to Gaultier. You could say we help each other see with each other's eyes.'

For Gaultier, the distance between himself and Hermès was not so great. When he worked at the couture house of Patou, he used to wear riding boots and was teased by the vendeuses (‘they asked me where was my “orse” ‘). In interviews he recalled the comment of the photographer Helmut Newton that Hermès is ‘the most important sex shop in the world,' highlighting the leather, whips and stirrups. His biographer, Colin McDowell, points out that Jean Paul Gaultier ‘hides his seriousness behind a facetious facade.' In so doing, he sums up the playful postmodern spirit of contemporary popular culture and has inspired young designers and other artists in the 1990s and beyond (including Martin Margiela and Nicolas Ghesquière) to dispense with convention and pursue their inner dreams. Academic Barbara Vinken sees him as inheriting the mantle of Elsa Schiaparelli—‘a kind of surrealism against the grain, which consciously makes a fool of itself.' But another, more straightforward Vinken observation may be more appropriate: ‘Gaultier has plundered the attic of fashion, and offers his customers his most daring and cheeky finds.'

What shines through in all of Gaultier's work and career is his lifelong love of fashion. ‘I am not interested in business,' he said in a newspaper interview in the early 1990s. ‘I didn't do fashion to be rich and famous. Of course, I like the rewards. They are a luxury for me, but my first luxury is to do what I want. I don't want to hand everything over to assistants and become a businessman.'

Further reading:
Farid Chenoune's
Jean Paul Gaultier
(1996) is a short introduction to the designer, but the biography
Jean Paul Gaultier
(2000), by Colin McDowell, is a more detailed read. Gaultier himself had fun with a comic book–style autobiography,
A Nous Deux La Mode
(1990), which is only available in French. The designer was also interviewed by Roger Tredre for
The Independent
(‘A One-man Revolt Against the Cliché', 2 August 1990).

The most successful design partnership in fashion history, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, burst onto the fashion scene in the mid-1980s through a mixture of talent, perspiration, inspired marketing and luck. They were the last Italian designers of the twentieth century to make a real mark, creating extravagant fashion collections that played with themes and periods with happy abandon. Their success was founded on sharp tailoring combined with street style and a flair for bringing to life the Italy of their and their customers' dreams.

The fashion press called them fashion's mix masters, making the comparison with DJs who mix music to create a kaleidoscope of sounds. Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana were rarely hesitant in their creative vision, churning out ideas in abundance and ransacking the decades (in particular the 1930s to the 1980s). In their magpie approach to fashion design, they summed up the free spirit of modern fashion. Among their hits: pinstripe mannish tailoring for women, underwear worn as outerwear, curvaceous dresses, spectacularly colourful coats and, invariably, lashings of leopard print. Despite an occasional misstep, they have a talent for tuning in to the mood of the times. As Gabbana put it, ‘Fashion has to be in step with the times. Today more than ever, conceptual just doesn't pay back and is destined to fail.'

Although in later years their collections displayed a taste that teetered into kitsch, the Dolce & Gabbana signature often encapsulates the best of Italian fashion. Journalist Sarah Mower, who edited their celebratory twentieth anniversary book, said they represented ‘a kind of psychic map of Italy.' The success of their partnership rested on the attraction of opposites, as they acknowledged in interview after interview; Dolce is the craftsman while Gabbana has his finger on the pulse of popular culture. As Gabbana put it: ‘We start from two really different points. He starts from the left, I start from the right. And we meet in the middle.'

Domenico Dolce, the older of the two, was born in Sicily in the village of Polizzi Generosa in 1958. His father was a tailor specialising in suits for local gentry's weddings, while his mother owned a general haberdashery store. Legend has it that Dolce's crib was set up in his father's workroom. Dolce grew up playing with fabrics; at seven he made a pair of trousers. At an exceptionally early age, the pattern was set for his life. Stefano Gabbana was born four years later in 1962 in Milan. There was no fashion in his family background: his father was a printer from Venice. An exceptionally good-looking young man, Gabbana moved to Milan to study graphic design in the early 1980s, a period when the city's fashion industry was flourishing as never before. The designer that caught the eye of Gabbana most
strongly was Elio Fiorucci, Italy's ebullient king of kitsch style.

Gabbana met Dolce on the phone initially when the latter answered a job enquiry call in the office where he was working. Dolce had moved to Milan from Sicily to study design and quickly landed a job as an assistant at a local fashion house. Taking Gabbana under his wing, he taught him to sketch and understand the design process before Gabbana was obliged to spend eighteen months on military service. By late 1982, Gabbana was back in town and the two were sharing an apartment. Their focus on work was relentless (Gabbana thinks he was probably thirty before they took their first holiday). But they also partied hard, out until the early hours at Amnesia and other hot clubs of the time, enjoying the sheer decadence of the fashion industry.