What Writing a Book About Jean Paul Gaultier Taught Me About the Iconic Designer

Once upon a time—actually about two years ago—I was asked to work on the Catwalk book about Jean Paul Gaultier. Upon looking at an Excel sheet that listed all of Gaultier’s womenswear collections (ready-to-wear and couture) between 1976 and 2020, my initial excitement about the project turned into terror. Each book in the series provides a comprehensive look at a designer’s careelr with reviews and often unseen pictures from every collection. Gradually, though, I turned back to flesh from stone, lured by the joy of research. Gaultier is many things—but boring isn’t one of them.

Now that the tome—it’s a heavy volume—is out, and I’ve been asked by my editor to talk a bit about my Gaultier adventure. I’ll start with a few takeaways that focus on the big picture followed by some very subjective subjects that delighted me during the process.

Gaultier, who has always played up heez Frenchiness (see the EuroTrash TV series and his dance single “How to Do That”), really lives by the national motto of “liberté, égalité, fraternité.” In so doing, he changed fashion in profound ways that today we take for granted. Street-casting is just one example of how the designer proselytized his belief that there’s beauty in individuality and difference. His casts represented the diversity, in terms of race, age, size, and gender, that could be found in France. Much of his career was a reaction to the well-mannered, elitist bourgeois values and aesthetics of the place. From collection to collection, he rejected them outright or took them apart and put them back together in his own way.

For Gaultier, fashion was always a trickle-up proposal, as might be expected from a protegé of Pierre Cardin who, as the story goes, hired Gaultier on his 18th birthday. Prêt-à-porter, which challenged the supremacy of couture, was not recognized by French fashion’s governing body until 1973, just a few years before Gaultier showed his first collection. Its title, Biker of the Opera, was indicative of the high/low dichotomy that defines so much of his work. Gaultier started with ready-to-wear and worked up to couture, and there was always a fluidity between the two categories of dress, with techniques and motifs trading freely between them, albeit executed with different materials and techniques. Gaultier threw down the gauntlet with his first couture collection, for spring 1997, showing garments made of upcycled denim among the more precious designs.