Who better to talk about fashion today than Jean Paul Gaultier? In any case, no one can boast of having lived through so many different fashion eras. He has worked for couture bastions such as Pierre Cardin and Jean Patou, and witnessed the liberation of women's wardrobes and the advent of ready-to-wear. He founded his own brand to shake up the formal world of 1970s French luxury and challenge the fantasy of Parisian chic. Like Claude Montana and Thierry Mugler, he lived through the liveliness of the 1980s, but knew how to reinvent himself so as not to remain the symbol of a bygone aesthetic.
While stirring up fashion with innovative ideas (the men's skirt, the mixed wardrobe, tattooing on the catwalk), Gaultier also ventured into haute couture and, between 2004 and 2010, he took over the artistic direction of France's most classic and luxurious fashion house, Hermès. He also designed fragrances: These now ensure the continuity of his fashion brand, which, like the fragrance license, is owned by the Spanish Puig Group.
Officially, Gaultier retired in January 2020, just in time for the Covid-19 crisis. In reality, he's still very active, involved in the fight against AIDS and ambassador for Sidaction (a major French public event that started in 1994 in France for raising awareness and collecting charitable funds for AIDS), the next edition of which will take place from March 22 to 24; he keeps an eye on the fashion sector and his hand in the business. For each haute couture collection of the brand that bears his name, he invites a designer of his choice to reinterpret his archives.
After Olivier Rousteing, Julien Dossena and Chitose Abe, and before Nicolas Di Felice for the June collection, he had asked Ireland's Simone Rocha to take up the challenge for the show held in January. It was in the haute couture lounges of his Paris headquarters, at 325 Rue Saint-Martin, in the third arrondissement, that Le Monde met Gaultier, amid Rocha's dresses, composed of pointed breasts and traversed by corset-like laces or stripes evoking the striped sweaters dear to the 71-year-old designer.
It's moving to see my codes reinterpreted, especially in a place where I used to work. It's like looking at my work from another planet. Simone Rocha is more romantic than I am, but we share a certain taste for the quirky. It's her British side. The French always have this thing of saying "that's chic, that's not," of wanting to define good taste. I wouldn't say I've suffered from it, but still.
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