Jean Paul Gaultier, pushing his glasses up on his nose, stood in the middle of the studio and looked at the model Alek Wek being fitted in a black-and-silver lace bodysuit that began as a hood over her head and extended down without a ripple over her neck and shoulders, over the small mound of her breasts, down her long legs and ended at her toes, so that every part of her body was covered in lace except the oval of her ebony face.
''Can you hear?'' Gaultier asked, tapping on her right ear. Wek nodded and smiled.
The fittings went on like this for several hours one day early last July, with Gaultier saying little, as other models came and left. He would not admit that he was in trouble with this collection, an haute couture show that in a few days he would stage before 700 editors and clients at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Couture is that hugely indefensible branch of the fashion world that is the opposite of a business, a fantasy land, where a simple dress can cost $20,000; add feathers and embroidery, and you're talking the price of an Ivy League education. Only a dozen designers qualify to be called couturiers, but the truth is, only three really matter: Chanel's Karl Lagerfeld, Dior's John Galliano and Gaultier. Because of their technical virtuosity, they have brought a new relevancy to couture, though with Gaultier, perhaps because he is Parisian and was 45 when he made his couture debut in 1997, you sense a more generous heart at work. He always manages to see Paris the same way that the photographer Helmut Newton sees Berlin: in autumnal light, with the click of high heels on wet pavement. This summer, in addition to everything else he does, Gaultier became creative director of women's wear for Hermès, the French luxury house and the shrine of establishment taste, giving him an even more powerful base from which to exert his influence.
But Gaultier started this couture collection late, only three weeks before, so that he could finish costumes for Pedro Almodóvar's next film and design some tour clothes for the French rock star Johnny Hallyday, and now the atelier would have to work every night until the early hours of the morning. You could tell from the shabbiness of the studio, though, that Gaultier was used to working under hard conditions and didn't complain about it. Even on days like this, when he had many things on his mind, he would often walk home through the crowded streets of the Bastille, though he was constantly stopped by strangers. Undoubtedly they recognized the bleached blond hair, the alert blue eyes and large protruding ears, a mug that is, in many ways, as symbolic of the new France as DeGaulle's was of postwar France -- before mass immigration, gay liberation, AIDS, radical politics and the triumph and perversity of individualism. With exceptional clarity and aim over the last 20 years, Gaultier has commented on these forces -- whether by presenting men in skirts, or projecting women's breasts as missile launchers, or asserting the beauty of ethnic dress -- so that his clothes have come to represent the defeat of the old France as surely as DeGaulle's proud beak once stood for its glory. To a great many people in France today, to the grande dame as well as to the pierced-and-tattooed man on the street, Gaultier is more than a fashion designer. He is a leading cultural figure.
But now, standing in the studio with his arms folded and his glasses on, Gaultier looked remarkably ordinary, and even more remarkably, he seemed to have nothing in common with his outrageous public image -- the Gaultier who ponced and clowned in the 90's as the co-host of the British TV program ''Eurotrash,'' the Gaultier who once mailed live turkeys to unsympathetic editors, the Gaultier who, in a 1989 show still recalled for its air of Nazi menace, presented models in black boots, coats trussed with harnesses and, jutting out from their felt helmets, a wedge of Dynel that slashed across their cheeks like the blade of a meat cleaver. In her review of the show, Bernadine Morris of The Times wrote, ''This is the seamy underbelly of fashion.''
Seamy perhaps, but hardly Gaultier's personal cup of tea. What is most paradoxical about Gaultier -- and what his appointment at Hermès confirms -- is that behind the outrage and runway antics lies a deeply serious and intelligent man. Though he was once a fixture on the London club scene, where he went to cruise as well as pick up new ideas, Gaultier, the only child of a bookkeeper and a secretary from the Paris suburb of Arcueil, says he is happiest alone. (Well, up to a point, says his business partner, Donald Potard, with a rueful laugh. ''Jean Paul has to be with at least one friend,'' says Potard, who has known Gaultier since they were 4 years old. ''He's a talker. So if he's alone. . . . '') He doesn't smoke, drinks but little and, according to Potard, doesn't take drugs. He rarely attends swank society affairs, though his couture clothes are worn by those kind of people, including Liliane Bettencourt, the richest woman in France; Mouna Ayoub, the former wife of a Saudi industrialist and a major couture buyer; the New York socialite Nan Kempner; and Catherine Deneuve, who basically, after Saint Laurent, wears only Gaultier. (He will be making the rounds next month in New York, though, when his company sponsors the ''Bravehearts: Men in Skirts'' exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
Gaultier, who has a small place in Marrakesh and is renovating a house in Paris (''a little English house with a garden''), says he prefers working to going out, in part because ''I'm always afraid I'll say something stupid.'' He also just likes the work. ''I always tell him, 'You work too much,''' Potard says. ''But I think he feels guilty if he's not working.''
There is, not surprisingly, a corollary to Gaultier's personality in his less exclusive and less expensive ready-to-wear. For behind the big bow-wow shows are highly wearable jackets, trousers and knits that are a mainstay of stores like Neiman Marcus and account for a significant portion of the company's annual sales of $450 million. ''He makes the best tailored clothes in the business,'' says Joan Kaner, the fashion director of Neiman Marcus. He is also one of the few designers I know in Paris or Milan who really does design the stuff that bears his name -- not just the show-stoppers, but the jeans, bags and men's wear too.
Gaultier is also deeply French, a fact that cannot be emphasized enough as he takes on Hermès, where he will present his first collection next March, at the fall 2004 ready-to-wear shows. Hermès has been run by the Dumas family -- more recently by Jean-Louis Dumas -- since 1837, when it provided coaches and saddles for aristocrats. You can't get any more French than the Dumas family or Hermès, which sells about $1 billion worth of scarves, watches, perfume, leather-bound agendas and, of course, bags, including the famous Kelly, for which there is a six-month wait.
For all their differences, Gaultier and Hermès hold one vital thing in common: each is a lone entity in a world dominated by luxury groups. Farida Khelfa, a star model of the 80's who has observed Gaultier closely for many years (she was until recently the director of his couture studio), sees it as significant that Gaultier, an only child, has aligned himself with the ultra-solitary Hermès. ''Hermès is just Hermès, no attachments,'' Khelfa says. ''I think it's very important for Jean Paul to work like that -- he has to be the only one.'' And don't forget, Lagerfeld, who is German, is employed at the discretion of the Wertheimer family of Chanel, and Galliano, who is English with Spanish roots, works for LVMH Moët Hennessey Louis Vuitton, which owns Dior. Gaultier and Hermès have no such ties.
In 1999, looking for capital to open Gaultier shops in New York and the Far East, Potard, a stocky, engaging man who once taught French in Tarboro, N.C., went to Dumas with the improbable suggestion that the luxury house invest in the maverick designer. Three days later, Dumas agreed to buy 35 percent of Gaultier's business for $26 million. ''Jean-Louis knows the value of things, and he knows the value of people,'' Potard told me one afternoon at Gaultier headquarters near the Bastille. ''Plus, we have the same way of running a company. We don't like debt; we don't spend money through the window.'' Potard, whom one American retailer described as ''very tight but very smart,'' certainly didn't waste any money on his office. It's easily the smallest, least impressive office of a fashion C.E.O. I've seen, its only memorable detail a classroom portrait taken when Potard and Gaultier were kids. After some difficulty, I picked out Gaultier. He was the kid with the biggest ears.
When I saw Dumas at the Paris men's shows in early July, he used almost the same words Potard had to describe his affinity with Gaultier, saying, ''We both put creativity and the quality of the product first,'' and noted with some pride that his office at Hermès is located next to its fabled ateliers. Dumas, clearly, is no fan of the aggressive marketing favored by Bernard Arnault, the chairman of LVMH, a strategy that many people in the fashion industry believe has shifted the focus toward celebrity and hype. Dumas made his own feelings plain six years ago when he hired the Belgian minimalist Martin Margiela, who is rarely seen or photographed. Margiela's clothes for Hermès were so quiet as to be mute. Last spring, with Margiela's contract due to expire in October, Dumas called Gaultier to ask if he knew anyone who might want the job -- and was dismayed, he says, when Gaultier recommended several designers, including Hussein Chalayan, but not himself.
Later, when I checked this version of events with Potard, he broke into a huge laugh and proceeded to describe one of the singular mating dances in fashion history: ''The real story is that Jean-Louis asked Jean Paul to give him some names, and when Jean Paul told me whom he had mentioned, I said, 'Of course, you proposed yourself.' And he said, 'No.' And I said, 'Don't you want to do it?' And he said, 'Yes.' And I said, 'Why didn't you propose yourself then?' And Jean Paul said, 'Because he didn't ask me.'''
Potard shook his head: ''These people are too polite! So Jean Paul calls Jean-Louis and invites him to lunch. They meet, and Jean Paul says, 'I will gladly do Hermès,' and Jean-Louis says, 'Oh, I was hoping you would.'''
Gaultier has already begun work on Hermès and expects to incorporate many of his own ideas, while keeping a sense of tradition. ''It has to have some line in it that is Hermès, that goes through the years,'' he says. ''What I can bring is something a little more feminine. Martin was only doing a Greta Garbo sort of woman. Me, I can bring a little more shape. And I will use the scarves and the prints.'' With Gaultier at Hermès, retailing executives also see an opportunity for the house to expand its apparel business, which accounts for only 15 percent of total sales. Dumas indicates the company is prepared to raise its fashion profile. But, as Domenico De Sole, the chief executive of Gucci, points out, Gaultier is only one part of the equation. ''You need to get your stores and salespeople geared up if you want to be successful,'' he says.
''And that requires a huge amount of time and investment. Gaultier will bring a lot of attention to the brand, but a lot will really depend on what Hermès wants to do with it.''
There is a small sting contained in the Gaultier-Hermès union. In 1996, Bernard Arnault rejected Gaultier's offer to design Dior and gave the job to Galliano, who was then at Givenchy. ''Mr. Arnault had some very harsh words about Jean Paul,'' Potard recalls. ''At the time, Jean Paul was presenting his TV show in England, and apparently Mr. Arnault hated it. I guess he thought Jean Paul was a talentless clown.'' Instead, Arnault offered him Givenchy, which, after Galliano, Potard says, seemed a slight. ''Jean Paul was quite affected by this attitude. It pushed him. He said, 'O.K., they don't want me; I'm going to do better than that.'''
And that's how Gaultier came to do haute couture. Today the house has some 70 full-time seamstresses serving a clientele of 80 women, a respectable number given that there are probably fewer than 500 women in the world who buy couture. ''Of course, we don't make money on the couture -- it would be a lie to say we make money,'' Potard says. ''But it's an incredible promotion. By doing this we really changed the image of the house. People who didn't understand his fashion before, suddenly did when he started doing couture.
From being the 'bad boy' of French fashion, he became the couturier Jean Paul Gaultier.''
In the studio before the July show, Gaultier regarded a delicate-boned Russian model named Anastassia Khozissova standing in a white python bodysuit. Annelise Heinzelmann, who is the head of the atelier -- and who looked like a woman who didn't stand for much nonsense -- came in, followed by two seamstresses carrying a long black-velvet Madame X dress. They helped Khozissova carefully step into the dress, inching the black velvet over the white python. It was Gaultier's intention to effect a different spatial dimension with his clothes, much as the Dutch designer Jurgen Bey has done with everyday objects like chairs that appear to transform into walls. And now, on Khozissova, the black gown amazingly did that; it seemed at once part of the white second skin and separate from it.
But Gaultier had given himself an awesome challenge. For in addition to designing some 30 different bodysuits, one for each girl, he had to come up with more than 60 other outfits that played off this idea of transformation. One bodysuit alone -- worn by the model Suzanne Von Aichinger and considered the centerpiece of the show -- had required more than 50 hours of fittings in the studio of the custom corseter, who is known only as Mr. Pearl. He had built a corset into the flesh-tone lace of the bodysuit and created a second one to wear over it.
At 5 a.m. on the day of the show, Gaultier went home to catch a few hours of sleep. But the problems with the collection would persist right up to the moment of the show, when Mr. Pearl, and Von Aichinger's corsets, went missing for nearly an hour, leaving 700 guests to wilt in the gathering heat of the Beaux-Arts.
The greatest influence on Gaultier's early career, he told me, was his grandmother Marie Garrabe, a beautician who practiced faith healing on her clients while she coiffed and beautified them. Because his parents both worked, Gaultier spent a lot of time with Garrabe, who, unlike the rest of his family, seems to have been a genuine character. Under her care, Gaultier was allowed to watch television and look at fashion magazines, which he would steal when short of funds. Then, as now, the Paris couture was covered extensively by all the French dailies and on radio and television. ''My only fashion school was what I saw in the newspapers and on television,'' Gaultier says, breaking into the tremulous voice of a commentator. '''Today, Louis Féraud did Mexican, Saint Laurent's collection was feminine and very strong,' et cetera. For me, all my knowledge came from journalists.''
Throughout his career, Gaultier's shows have been peopled with the strange spiritual descendants of Garrabe and the women he observed in her home beauty parlor -- women with unnaturally teased hair, whitened faces and skirts seemingly made from the lace tablecloth. But, as a child, with no regular visitors to his house except for Potard, Gaultier embellished his circumstances. ''I was lying all the time,'' he said in 1994. ''I wanted to be interesting because I thought my life was boring. And when I started to work in the fashion business, I was a little ashamed of my relatives. Maybe they were not as elegant as I wanted them to be. But after a while I knew they deserved more because they are nice mentally. They are even nicer than some of the people who are fashionable. So after that, I said to myself, No more lies.''
In 1976, after a brief journeyman period at several houses, including Cardin, Gaultier presented his first collection. It featured a studded leather jacket worn with a tutu and tennis shoes and earned him a small notice in Le Monde. At his side was his boyfriend, Francis Menuge, who had given up law school to help Gaultier. ''My obsession became his obsession,'' Gaultier says. Their partnership would prove amazingly fluent and productive all through the 80's as Gaultier pursued themes like androgyny, recycling (as early as 1979 he used lamé to line surplus camouflage) and fetishism, a look that acquired pop approval when Madonna wore his corsets for her 1990 ''Blonde Ambition'' tour. Like Thierry Mugler, who projected the era's sexual deliriums with latex and Amazonian bodies, Gaultier brought a sense of performance to fashion. You didn't just go to a Gaultier show; you went dressed in Gaultier, and you prayed that panic wouldn't ensue among the 3,000 gaudily decked and daubed guests.
After Menuge's death from AIDS in 1990, Gaultier went into retreat for several years. Potard stepped in to run the business, but Gaultier has not found another person to share his life. ''I will not cry about that fact,'' he told me. ''I had the luck to love someone and to have done something with him. So I am lucky. There are some people who have never been in love. I have been in love one time and maybe I will be again.'' The difficulty, he says, is finding someone who can share the same emotion, ''who will not be bored with me explaining something. It doesn't have to be another designer.'' He grimaces and laughs. ''No, no, I don't think so.''
As much as Gaultier was attuned to the social forces of the 80's, some part of his brain still heard those enchanted radio voices of his youth. Today, Louis Féraud did Mexican. . . . This is the sense, more than any other, that his couture shows impart -- of Paris as you imagine it to be. I remember several years ago going up to Marie-Laure de Noailles's old house in the 16th Arrondissement, a house that once received Cocteau and most of the Surrealists and Dadaists and where, on a wet January morning, Gaultier staged his spring couture show. If he had once used his fashion to agitate for acceptance of different kinds of self-expression, he was, in those empty rooms, betraying a weakness for all things French, which, in an age of marketing and global brands, were suddenly his alone to possess: the tiny knots of the models' taut turbans, the jeune fille trench coats, the dark gray pantsuits sparkling with savoir-faire.
Now at the Beaux-Arts, nearly 30 minutes after the July couture show was supposed to have begun, the tension backstage was unbearable. Mr. Pearl still had not arrived with the corsets. Gaultier tried to sound chipper as he spoke to Potard. ''It was a nightmare,'' Potard recalls. ''Mr. Pearl is a wonderful person, but he has no idea of what time is.'' Finally, at about 8:10 p.m., Mr. Pearl appeared, announcing it would take another 30 minutes to lace Von Aichinger into her outfit. At 8:45, as a voice on the loudspeaker intoned, ''Numéro dix-huit. . . . Passe-passe,'' Von Aichinger stepped out on the runway and neatly twirled, receiving the loudest applause of the night. No one knew of the drama backstage or the previous three weeks, and doubtless they did not know, when the first guests reached Gaultier afterward, why he had tears in his eyes.
Next year Gaultier will move his offices and workrooms, which are scat-tered around Paris, to a 50,000-square-foot building with an elegant stairway on the Avenue Saint-Martin. It will finally give him a proper house.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/01/27/fashion/20110127-gaultier-10.html
http://www.style.com/video/fashion-shows-by-designer/jean-paul-gaultier/1043971092001
After reading the article and watching the video and slide show explain how Gaultier's past, coming up, scuplted the overall style and influence of his work. Also, look closely at the style.com video and identify different components which you think are distinctive to what the article has presented about his style, production and price point. This blog is due on Jan 13, 2011.
