A bona fide living legend walked into Jean Paul Gaultier’s show Wednesday, and I don’t mean Violet Chachki, winner of season seven of RuPaul’s Drag Race, even if Violet is one of the legendary children with a pretty fabulous look; this Paris afternoon, she gave us Blade Runner 2049 geisha when she sashayed into the room. No, the legend in question was the 95-year-old Pierre Cardin, whose career is forever associated with the ’60s, despite his many decades of working. (And he wasn’t the only designer there, incidentally; former Gaultier design assistant Nicolas Ghesquière was also in attendance.) You could sense Cardin’s presence, of the era he represents, before he even as much as took a step towards his seat. That we were going back to the time that fashion has never forgotten was evident not from the “Groovy, Baby” Bridget Riley–esque swirling black-and-white invite to the show.
Usually catching a whiff of the 1960s pre-show is enough to have your eyes rolling into the back of your head, as if you’ve taken one too many downers. Yet, given the politically challenging moment we live in and the terrific orchestrated responses we’re seeing to it, mirroring that decade’s affirmative (and combative) actions on gender, race, and sexual politics, it might have been timely.
In the end, it wasn’t the ’60s that Gaultier explored through his couture, which is a pity because this is a designer who’s pushed a few political buttons in his time. In fact, the referencing of the decade was a bit of a bait and switch. In the end, it provided a twist, a few times explicit, more usually barely perceptible, to Gaultier’s familiar haute couture tropes—the smoking, the trench, the Hollywood siren evening dress. The opening look—curvy Op Art tunic over a miniskirt, one leg clad in black hose, the other in white—might have been Peggy Moffitt redux, but it was all over in the blink of a false eyelashed eye. The preponderance of black and white—highlighted with a few outfits in Day-Glo colors—was used for looks that were more akin to Chachki’s ensemble, with ’40s jackets in molded black leather or rose gold silk. There was fringe galore, too—there’s been so much swish and swing these past few days—on some very bright dresses. But it looked best when the fringe, all 1,500 meters of it, was suspended from the sleeves of a perfect double-breasted tux and strung all over the matching trousers.
