![]() ![]() Here, in celebration of 50 years in the fashion game, we explore five trends that Gaultier did first: from man-skirts and tattoo tops, to elevated denim and runway diversity. “Gaultier in this scope triumphs as an innovator and given the breadth of his work there is so much to choose from. “There’s a sense of ‘been there done that’ with modern designers that have prompted consumers to look back in time,” says Johnny Valencia of LA’s Pechuga Vintage. It’s in part, no doubt, down to Kim Kardashian’s predilection for his sheer body stockings, but also because his anarchic designs – with their disregard for the boundaries of gender or good taste – feel particularly primed for our current moment. On Vestiaire Collective, sales of vintage Gaultier rose 40 per cent in 2019, while searches for his name hit 187 per cent. ![]() The proof of his colossal impact remains in the simple fact that, decades on, people still want to wear his clothes. ![]() “Gaultier was the first and the last pop designer,” says Thierry-Maxime Loriot, curator of The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk, which ran at the Barbican in 2014. He’s the Madonna of Haute Couture” – Thierry-Maxime Loriot “Gaultier was the first and last pop designer. His legendary corsets put women firmly in control. He put men in skirts and made sailor boys sexy, and when it came to women, to whom he was devoted, he knew that liberation didn’t simply mean a trouser suit: sensuality and exposure could mean freedom too. In doing so, he opened fashion’s once-shut doors to his colourful band of ‘fashion freaks’, filling his runways with a multitude of body shapes and races and ages with drag queens and pop stars and actresses, long before this kind of casting became the norm. Collections skewered gender binaries and cherry-picked from a diverse array of cultures, but always began with something Gaultier had seen on the street: from British punks and bourgeois businessmen, and even, controversially, orthodox Jewish rabbis. Gaultier may have founded his namesake label in 1976, but it was the late 1980s and early 1990s which saw the designer rise to a level of fame which stretched way beyond Paris’ then-stuffy fashion scene. The joyful 200-look offering, modelled by the designer’s muses past and present, from Amanda Lear and Rossy de Palma to Anna Cleveland and Dita Von Teese, was essentially his greatest hits, and a fittingly grand finale for fashion’s perennial showman. On Wednesday night in Paris, iconoclastic French designer Jean Paul Gaultier took his final bow on the runway, rounding out a career which spanned five decades and saw him become one of fashion’s most influential and inventive designers, whose collections – a colourful blend of provocation, campy humour and all-out spectacle – mischievously flouted social norms. ![]()
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