Inside the world of Jean Paul Gaultier

Madonna’s album “Like A Prayer” made waves in 1990 with its scandalous imagery of burning crosses and overt sexuality. But while few people remember the tracks on the record, many might recall the cone bra and corset she wore during her Blonde Ambition tour.  The undergarments worn as outerwear have become emblematic of the singer as well as the designer who made it, Jean Paul Gaultier. Now these, along with 140 other masterpieces by the enfant terrible, are included in his retrospective exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum titled “The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk.”

Aside from seeing costumes, corsets and couture, many fashion enthusiasts will also be able to learn interesting tidbits about the designer — that he worked in Manila as a store manager, dressed Imelda Marcos and that the first one to wear the cone bra wasn’t, in fact, the Material Girl.

Jean Paul Gaultier was born in 1952 in Arcueil, a suburb of Paris, to parents he describes as “modest but open-minded.” Even from a young age, he was constantly encouraged by his grandmother Marie to be creative. “I was an only child and she let me do anything I wanted,” said Gaultier. “I had a teddy bear named Nana which I experimented on by giving it a cone bra made out of two crude papier-mâché lumps.” Current events and the people around him influenced his creativity. He made a wedding dress for Nana and “married” it after watching on TV the royal nuptials of Fabiola to Baudouin of Belgium.  When the first open heart surgery was aired, he operated on Nana, sticking pins and needles into its stomach. At seven years old, he made sketches of the women who visited his grandmother for beauty treatments and tarot readings. “I’d give them Marilyn Monroe or Brigitte Bardot hair. It was like giving them a new look, a before and after.” From the get-go, one could already see that Gaultier was no ordinary person. He was a creative genius with an amazing imagination.

Tribute to talent

The multimedia exhibit is a celebration of Gaultier’s 37-year career as a fashion designer. And in true Gaultier tradition, this is no ordinary retrospective. While it begins with his signature mariner stripe collection, he took it one step further by using a high-tech audiovisual system which projects moving faces on each of the mannequins. This makes them appear like real people talking, winking, whistling and singing. It is organized into six thematic sections by curator Thierry-Maxime Loriot and traces the diverse influences marking his artistic development.

Other highlights from the exhibition include the corset worn by Beyoncé at a 2009 concert in Las Vegas, facsimile sketches and the actual corsets Madonna wore in her Blond Ambition and MDNA World tour. There is also a giant punk rock room featuring Gaultier’s anglophile, mohawked creations, with walls covered with graffiti murals, while an automated runway rotate models around a central track and a Red Light District-themed room to showcase Gaultier’s BDSM-inspired collection with mannequins placed in faux windows built into the facade of a giant two-story building. A whole room is dedicated to Gaultier’s interpretations of global fashion featuring outfits covering everything from the wintry climate of Russia to African-inspired dresses, pirates, rabbis and Native Americans. Also featured is a top from his first women’s ready-to-wear collection, which was made using raffia placemats from the Philippines. 

Sketch Artiste

Although a very artistic young boy, Gaultier wasn’t a stellar student in school. “I wasn’t very good at anything. Nobody wanted me on the football team!” When he was nine, a woman he saw on TV wearing fishnet stockings and sequins fascinated him. “The day after in school, I tried sketching her. My teacher was behind me and she told me to stand up and pinned my sketch on my back to humiliate me. But because of that, people loved it and started asking me to sketch for them. It was my passport to be loved, to be accepted.”

Gaultier never received formal training as a designer but was considered a prodigy when it came to fashion design. At age 13 he designed a collection of clothing for his mother and grandmother. “I remember watching a movie called Falbalas which was about a couturier who fell in love with his muse. After seeing it, I knew it was the job I wanted. I wanted to be like him.” When only 14, in 1964, he started sketching his fashion ideas on paper and sent the sketches to famous couture stylists. Pierre Cardin was impressed by his talent and hired him as an assistant.

In 1974, Gaultier was sent to the Philippines by Cardin to represent him and look after his boutique. He was also put in charge of designing clothes for then-First Lady Imelda Marcos, who he calls a “horror.” At that time Gaultier was not yet trained to do fittings, but he did one for her. “I kept saying “Raise it here! Raise it here!” and the sewing person had to do it. Imelda looked very bad, but she did not complain — she thought that was how they do it in Paris.” He had an assistant named Helena Carratala who was hired because she was fluent in French. He taught her draping, drawing and dressmaking. She eventually put up her own label called Azabache and now runs and owns Mangenguey, a resort in a small island in Palawan.

It was also while living in Manila that Gaultier learned how to speak English albeit with a Spanish accent because “they were speaking English, but also Spanish.” His designs proved hugely popular among his powerful Filipino clientele, so much so, he says, that the government refused him an exit visa when he wanted to leave. Finally, he pretended his grandmother died and was able to fly home.

Of corsets and cone bras

Aside from the striped mariner shirt and the cone bra being several of Gaultier’s signature looks, the corset is also a fashion piece that he is most associated with. “I think the corset is a mix of femininity and masculinity. When worn under a man’s suit, it shows how the woman is strong and seductive.”

His fetish for the tightly fitted undergarment came from his grandmother. “When I was little, I thought my grandmother was supremely elegant. She was undoubtedly very old-fashioned, but I considered her style absolutely wonderful. At her home, she had black crepe hats, feather aigrettes, and corsets from the early 1900s.”

One day while she was away, Gaultier was looking around her house and found a very strange thing, which he later learned was a corset. “It was strange because it was salmon, very shiny with a strange shape and had laces,” he recalls. “When she came back, I asked her what it was for. She said it was something orthopedic and made the waist very tight and thin. She told me that women would drink vinegar to bring on stomach contractions to get a smaller waist. That was all food for my imagination.”

When he came to New York in 1981, he saw girls in a Broadway show who were wearing salmon corsets. “I remembered my grandmother and decided to use it in my collection. I didn’t make the exact corset but used similar techniques and paired it in different styles — a dress, a short dress, a jumpsuit and with a skirt — always with the corset structure on top. Now, I always do it, even a new version.” Gaultier doesn’t limit wearing the corset to women. He has made them to fit a man, too. “I like to show the male object. I’m all for equality of sex. I want to show the man can be fragile and does not have to be ashamed of wearing a corset.”

Madonna, who Gaultier admits is someone he has made beautiful collaborations with, said she never thought the corset and cone bra costumes they worked on together for her shows and Vogue video would end up having an impact on media, music, fashion and pop culture in general. They met at his atelier in Paris and went to Los Angeles to discuss things and watch the tour rehearsals. Things were done step by step and the costumes were a blend of their ideas. “Gaultier’s corsets are very sexy-looking and I consider wearing them a form of personal expression. The practice is oppressive only if it is forced, and women today can choose to wear them or not. I wore them as garments on the outside, the complete opposite of the way they were traditionally worn in order to achieve a certain shape,” she says. “I think that inversion of the concept of the corset is what turns it into a symbol of feminine power and sexual freedom.”

In addition to Madonna, Jean Paul Gaultier has dressed other famous celebrities including Kate Hudson, Cate Blanchett, Catherine Deneuve, Dita Von Teese, Marion Cotillard, and Nicole Kidman. The late Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain was also a huge fan. Despite his grunge uniform of wearing shirts around his waist and sweaters with holes, he was always dressed in Gaultier.

A true provocateur

Many will be either enthralled or surprised at the many outfits Gaultier has designed throughout his career, some of which took more than 100 hours to fabricate. But one thing remains certain — everything the fashion world’s bad boy churns out, no matter how daring or scandalous, it’s always bound to be a very good thing.

“To be honest, I didn’t think about having a big house and people to order around. For me, it was doing dresses, clothes, designing, sketching, finding nice fabric. It wasn’t to be famous or rich. It was like a little boy dreaming to play this game and I’ve been playing this game all my life. I wish for everyone to have that — to have a dream and go on doing it all your life.”

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The “Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk” exhibit runs until Feb. 23, 2014 at the Brooklyn Museum. For more information, log on to . Follow @jpgaultier, @brooklynmuseum and the author @alexeivee on Twitter.