First a bit of prehistory. When Jean Paul Gaultier introduced menswear circa the early ’80s, he called up Stephen Jones. He’d seen the milliner in Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” video looking dashing in a fez and wanted him for his show. Jones declined to walk, but made fezzes for the models. Today he was in the front row at the designer’s haute couture presentation. “Blink and you’ll miss me,” he said of that long-ago video. Gaultier put men’s looks on the runway for the first time in recent memory this afternoon and he wanted more Stephen Jones fezzes. Both men and women wore them on the catwalk.
This was a collection about tailoring and its versatility across genders. And also about smoking? The words “Smoking or No Smoking” were projected against the backdrop. Gaultier seemed to be poking not-so-subtle fun at the health police, while working his way through a nightclub’s worth of Le Smokings. The former project was less interesting than the latter. His smokings were alternately deconstructed into a double-breasted bustier dress; cut sleeveless and pants-less but for the trouser boots; printed trompe l’oeil on a caftan; and packable, just like your childhood windbreaker, into a little nylon pouch.
He’s a master tailor to this day, but he’s also the couture’s chief purveyor of camp. It came on fairly thick with all of the allusions to smoking. There was also this: For the finale, a guy and a girl emerged topless but for clear plastic shields tucked into their waistbands. His read “Tetons Libres,” the French translation of hers, which spelled out “Free the Nipple” in a timely callback to his early days of questioning gender rules. It was the early ’80s when he first put men in skirts, an act radical enough to make headlines far beyond the fashion pages at the time. Closing the loop, that Culture Club video was about a gender renegade. Gaultier might not shock like he used to, but he’s still a rebel at heart.
