Over at the Le Comedia theater on Paris’s Boulevard de Strasbourg, the Mugler Follies, a feathery, frisky frolic of a show, is packing ’em in every night. But for one evening only, it got a little competition in the burlesque arena from Jean Paul Gaultier’s Rosbifs in Space, the name of his fall 2014 collection. (For those of you who don’t know, rosbifs is the term of endearment the French use for Les Anglais.) By the time you’d schlepped to the 19th Arrondissement, you were certainly ready for a little spectacle, and you got it from the get-go; forget seeing Rihanna and Beth Ditto sitting front row, it’s hard to beat the Barbarella-goes-to-the-office vibe of Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer’s only building in Paris, which is (you couldn’t make this up) the HQ of the French Communist party. This was the setting for a show Gaultier built around his notion of JPG Airlines, which would have given the air company depicted in Pedro Almodovar’s I’m So Excited! a run(way) for its money. The futuristically clad models were checked in by JPG’s ground staff before boarding the runway. (Given the amount of models he sent out, clearly the plane was the size of the Dreamliner.) To camp or not to camp, that is never the question at a Gaultier show; a consummate showman, he’s only interested in good-humored fun.
Whatever this mise-en-scène, the fashion point here was Gaultier’s homage to all things English, and not, as one might have imagined, Gravity. Gaultier has certainly gotten as much if not more out of the United Kingdom’s institutions and idiosyncrasies, from the monarchy to punk, as many British designers, maybe more so. The show was chock full of Anglo references, worked through many, many, many of the pieces we associate with the designer. There was his trio of takes on the MA-1 flight jacket, now sporting wider, rounder shoulders, perhaps zippered, a fox fur draped over one of them. There was the Union Jack flag interpreted as everything from an oversize sweater mapped out in crisscross formations mapped out in criss-cross formations with zippers, or as a short velvet dress and mink bomber. And there was, of course, plaid, with a tartan in bondage passage modeled by a family of four, including two utterly adorable teeny-tiny punky kids who must have won over even the most curmudgeonly audience members.
Of course, the other question is whether all of the madcap antics obscure the clothes. At this stage of the game, and with the kind of back catalog he owns behind him, Gaultier probably doesn’t care, and who can blame him? Better to be enjoying the show these days than be overwrought about it. And certainly every now and then a flash of his brilliance would stand right there before you, such as an impeccably cut black leather blazer, its sleeves scissored off leaving only an extended shoulder line, or another black jacket, this time in grain de poudre wool, its front cascading with silver-and-gold beaded fringe.
