A tribute to the bad boy of fashion: Jean Paul Gaultier (2024)

SAN FRANCISCO — The cone bra. Men in kilts and codpieces. Corsets as outerwear.

Welcome to the House of Gaultier, where cheekiness is the height of chic. Hailed as one of the greatest living fashion designers, Jean Paul Gaultier has always had the chutzpah to bring the grit of street fashion into the rarefied realm of haute couture. Inspired by everything from bondage and body art to the Folies Bergère, he has been playfully stitching together the punk, the luxe and the avant-garde since the ’70s.

Now, on the eve of his 60th birthday, the iconic French designer is rocking the museum world with the first major retrospective of his work. “Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk,” a flashy mashup of the designer’s 35-year reign over the fashion world, runs through Aug. 19 at San Francisco’s de Young Museum before heading to Europe.

“Jean Paul Gaultier has been called the bad boy of fashion. He is the best boy of fashion,” says Gladys Perint Palmer, executive director of fashion at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University. “He makes magic on the runway.”

Gaultier scoffs at tradition. In a milieu dominated by storied old French fashion houses, he has always gone his own way.

Gaultier never received any formal training as a designer. Instead, at the age of 17, he sent sketches to famous couture stylists. That paid off when Pierre Cardin hired him on as an assistant in 1970. It was a humble beginning for the man who went on to run the house of Hermès and found his own maison. Now a fashion legend, he still demurred at the idea of a retrospective exhibit.

“Oh, but that’s for dead people. I am still alive,” says the dapper trendsetter in his lilting French accent. Born to a tight-knit middle class family in the Parisian suburb of Arcueil in 1952, he credits his love of the female form and his fondness for corsetry to his grandmother, and he doesn’t put on airs about his craft.

“I don’t think I am an artist,” says Gaultier, clad in a simple black suit, “but to be a designer is to be connected with what is happening in society … the essence of the moment.”

Glad rags are all the rage in museums these days. The Gaultier homage is the latest in a series of blockbuster couture exhibits across the country, from the de Young’s Yves Saint Laurent and Cristóbal Balenciaga shows to Alexander McQueen’s “Savage Beauty” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. All that activity is blurring the lines between fashion and art, commerce and culture.

Certainly the de Young exhibit, with its moving catwalk and animated mannequins (whose eyes seem to follow you), pays tribute to showmanship as well as art. That is apropos, given Gaultier’s penchant for spectacle. He once held court on MTV wearing a leopard-print Speedo with matching thigh-high boots and maxi fake fur. One of the most audaciously high-tech shows in the history of the museum, it’s bound to be a mecca for the legions of superfans gaga over Gaultier.

The openly gay fashion star has long used his designs as way to deconstruct social conventions about gender and sexuality. Flamboyance is the mode of this style maven, who made the cone bra and the corset fashion staples, sent men in kilts down the runway and has a penchant for garter belts and codpieces. This installation features a cavalcade of quirky couture including about 130 ensembles, from an outlandish Native American headdress-dominated wedding gown and a “baby bump” corset (really?) to a parasol spun from hair. The exhibit traces Gaultier’s life and work, from 1976 through today, via a treasure trove of sketches, runway footage, accessories and archival tidbits.

“His is a great aesthetic imagination,” says Natalie Bondil, director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, who helped curate the exhibit. “He is a great artist whose medium is couture but goes beyond couture.”

Outrageousness emerges as a key theme for Gaultier, whose oeuvre has celebrated everything from breasts and mermaids to sailors and farm animals. Sexuality pervades the exhibit (he has been called “the astronaut of corsetry”) as does celebrity worship (although his controversial Amy Winehouse collection is not included). For the record, Gaultier has been spotted on the likes of everyone from Madonna (the original cone bra goddess) and Lady Gaga to Kylie Minogue (she’s the one in that full body lace suit in the exhibit’s posters).

This is definitely fashion as theater, clothing as high drama. That eye for the sensational may be why he has dressed so many movies, from Pedro Almodóvar’s “Kika” and Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover” to Luc Besson’s “The Fifth Element.” Sometimes it’s hard to believe the sweet and soft-spoken Frenchman holding forth at the press preview is also the couture wild child who created such unabashedly bizarre attire. One wonders what his grandmother would have thought of the fetishistic equestrian domination collection.

“It’s not my aim to be provocative,” he says, “I want to reflect what I see and feel around me.”

Certainly he has always been mindful of courting pop culture as well as the glitterati. Gaultier is a power tweeter, and he has designed a line for Target. But the revered designer may be most notable for his genuine sense of joy about clothes and people.

That’s been his attitude about life since he was a little boy. Since he was not allowed to play with dolls, per se, he designed his first cone bra for his teddy bear.

While the snob factor at the museum’s press day was quite high, with ostentatiously clad pundits elbowing each other for access to the star of the show, Gaultier himself was always generous with his time and attention. He does travel with an entourage, but he doesn’t hide behind it.

He playfully scrawled his name and a heart on the museum wall, pressed the flesh and waited until the last of the star-struck fashionistas got the autograph they longed for. And, finally, he bid the throng adieu.

Contact Karen D’Souza at 408-271-3772. Read her stories at www.mercurynews.com/karen-dsouza and follow her at www.Twitter.com/KarenDSouza4.