“We designers think we’ve invented something, but we haven’t at all,” Jean Paul Gaultier told Vogue when talking about his Fin de Siècle collection, the subject of which was a century of fashion, from S-curve corsets to Lycra. Gaultier’s aim was not to replicate the past: “It’s not modern to do an exact copy,” he told Vogue. “You have to mix up the decades in order to achieve a modern silhouette.” If current fashion is defined by a high-low mix, that of the late 1990s was fixated on an old-new one. “A lot of young girls like old movies and dream to have old dresses that you can’t find anymore,” Gaultier told The New York Times. “I played with that.” The designer, who bizarrely gave interviews from a velvet-lined box, saved his biggest magic trick for the finale: Madonna in a slip dress pushing an antique pram from which she lifted a young pup.
