Diary of a ginger girl: 2014

With its handmade conical falsies, Nana the teddy bear is the touching witness to the first creative steps of Jean Paul Gaultier who, as a little boy, was fascinated by the old-fashioned charm of corsets. His maternal grandmother Marie introduced him at a very young age to women’s fashions and Falbalas, the Jacques Becker film that narrates the rise of a young couturier.Brought up by strong women, the couturier does not subscribe to the myth of the weaker sex. He humorously reinterprets corsets, symbols of the incarcerated female body.

Although Gaultier’s corseted women seem to be a negation of feminist struggles, in reality the corset, far from being an instrument of torture that imprisons women’s bodies, now embodies the new power of the female and shapes its counterpoint of the male jacket, the distant progeny of the medieval knight’s suit of armour. Many stars have worn versions of his corsets with concentrically topstitched bra cups: Madonna tops the list, with the iconic designs for the 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour, but Catherine Ringer, Cindy Sherman, Grace Jones, Dita Von Teese and Kylie Minogue have also sported these creations.

For Jean Paul Gaultier, the skin and the body are inexhaustible sources of inspiration. In his hands, materials become “second skins”. In opposition to the rule of thinness, he has offered the sensuality of plus sizes and sent out a powerful message: Be yourself, no matter what nature and culture have dealt you!

For his runway shows, he held the first open casting calls, recruiting with classified advertisements that read: “Non-conformist designer seeks unusual models—the conventionally pretty need not apply.”

JPG was born in Parisian suburbs,but his heart beats to the rhythm of both rough-and-ready Paris and rock-attitude London. He is fascinated by the Paris of the Belle Époque and the interwar years, the Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec and the Moulin Rouge, the colourful throngs of the Barbès area and, of course, the Eiffel Tower. He loves the postcard capital that brings to mind the Parisians in Brassaï’s photographs, the local wenches and rogues that frequented the city’s bistros and cabarets

In the early 1970s Gaultier travelled to London and got his first look at the ground-breaking styles adopted by the punks of Trafalgar Square. The anti-materialist principles of punk would have an influence on the designer, enabling him to explore a nonconformist fashion inspired by the energy of London’s streets, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s SEX boutique, and the glam rock movement spearheaded by David Bowie and his alter ego Ziggy Stardust. Penury forced him to be inventive; the total rebellion, the trash and “destroy” look appealed to him.

He loves turning fashion into spectacle, and sees runway shows as happenings, trips to special worlds of his devising, with their own original soundtracks, decors and unusual casting choices.
The costumes that Jean Paul Gaultier has designed for the silver screen sustain the dramatic intensity of the films while remaining true to his own creative vocabulary, as evidenced by his collaborations with Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (The City of Lost Children), Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover), Luc Besson (The Fifth Element) and, above all, Pedro Almodóvar

Élection de Miss Jean Paul Gaultier 2015, as it was called, was divided into sections showcasing the designer's most famous work, along with some questionable outliers. The rhinestones and ravaged denim of Miss Femme de Footballeur and the Mexican wrestling costumes of Miss Lucha Libre aren't high up in the pantheon of Gaultier's designs. The Miss Smoking section, on the other hand, demonstrated that Gaultier hasn't lost his touch when it comes to man-for-woman tailoring; the fact that his double-breasted jacket/cocktail-dress hybrids look so normal now is a testament to how groundbreaking and subversive his talent was. The of-a-certain-age gals who teetered down the runway arm in arm with bare-chested men were a reminder of the ways he challenged not just runway conventions but also mainstream attitudes. Nor has Gaultier lost his notorious sense of humor. The show's real crowd-pleaser (hey, we're a narcissistic bunch) was Miss Rédactrice du Mode, a section devoted to magazine editors and their signature looks. Credit to Stéphane Marais and Odile Gilbert for turning model Magdalena Jasek into a young Grace Coddington and Chantal Monaghan into a very believable Carine Roitfeld. Lindsey Wixson also did a stand-up job in a Suzy Menkes pompadour wig.When it came time to pick a winner, the competition came down to Anna Cleveland and Coco Rocha, in Gaultier's iconic cone-bra corset dresses. Coco won, but Anna wrenched the crown for herself, and a shower of gold confetti fell as the designer took his trademark running bow. It is the end of an era, but Gaultier went out smiling like he always does. And for those who left with tears in their eyes, we'll always have Paris in January, when he stages his next Couture show.