Jean Paul Gaultier took to Twitter today to announce that he will present his final couture collection for fall 2020. “This show celebrating 50 years of my career will also be my last,” he wrote. The Wednesday night festivities are bound to bring forth smiles and tears. To mark the news, we are publishing Gaultier’s spring 1997 couture debut.
Gaultier truly believed in trickle-up, vernacular fashion. While other designers had referenced “the street” (Yves Saint Laurent’s Beat-inspired moto jacket remade in alligator cost him his job at Christian Dior), Gaultier walked the walk. Not only did he elevate humble materials like denim and mesh, he saw beauty in places where others weren’t looking. From the start his castings were diverse in terms of age, race, and size, and on his runways models mixed with “real” people.
All of which is to say, Gaultier might’ve been an unlikely couturier, if not for his mega talent. For his debut, he revisited androgyny, one of his design signatures, and it made for a modern outing. “Gaultier has done unisex couture, which is probably the newest take on the old métier yet,” Vogue said at the time. “You know, more and more women and men do things together, they go to the same hairdresser, they wear the same perfume, they buy a lot of the same clothes,” Gaultier told the magazine. “So why not couture for men?” In 2020, 24 years later, he seems rather prescient.
There was killer tailoring aplenty in Gaultier’s spring 1997 collection, alongside corsets for men and women. More shocking, perhaps, was the designer’s choice to include denim, shower shoes, visible garment tags, and logos, all tropes more associated with ready-to-wear and everyday, casual dressing than haute couture. And even more impactful when compared with the very dressed-up aesthetic introduced by John Galliano and Alexander McQueen at their debuts at Christian Dior and Givenchy, respectively, during that watermark couture season.
Over the years Gaultier has sometimes let his sense of play run too free, but there is no denying his ability and the skillfulness of the ateliers. This was on full display in two looks that honored the traditions of the métier, and one that broke free from them. A diaphanous white dress of tulle with matching black shawl, both with a Directoire delicacy, and a pink-dragon-embroidered corset dress with a draped claret-colored skirt made the pages of Vogue. Out of this world was a rainbow-feathered ensemble that was something else altogether. A mixing of human and animal worlds, it gave material form to Gaultier’s couture fantasies.
