Preview: Brooklyn Museum says ‘Oui’ to The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier
by Linda Sheridan
At last night’s preview event for the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier, fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier and Thierry-Maxime Loriot shed light on the painstaking process of condensing such an extensive career. The exhibit opens Friday, Oct. 25.
For nearly four decades, Jean Paul Gaultier has designed haute couture pieces for some of the world’s most iconic performers, from Madonna to Beyoncé and Lady Gaga. In his peripatetic life, he dresses runway models at fashion shows around the world, creates fragrances, interviews celebrities and designs costumes for films such as The City of Lost Children and The Fifth Element.
Always joyful and full of energy, Gaultier shows no signs of slowing down. So it should come as no surprise when Thierry-Maxime Loriot, the handsome curator of Gaultier’s mesmerizing exhibition The Fashion World of Jean-Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk, opening today at Brooklyn Museum, admits that the most difficult aspect of putting this exhibit together was “making the selection of clothes [with Gaultier], editing down from 10,000 to 150 pieces.”
The exhibit, brainchild of Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’s Nathalie Bondil, director and chief curator, and Loriot (a former high fashion model from Quebec City discovered by Mario Testino who later studied art history and was given an opportunity by Bondil to curate this exhibit), was not a quick sell. It took time to encourage Gaultier to agree to an exhibit he said at last night’s conversation at the museum.
“Five years ago, when I approached him, he thought [to have an exhibit] in a museum was to be in a cemetery,” Bondil jokes. But she was inspired by Gaultier’s body of work, that displayed “tolerance, [equality of] gender, plus size models. He let everyone play with fashion.”
“I’m very honored and surprised,” Gaultier says. “At first I didn’t want the exhibit. But, museums are an important part of our culture. I’m like a child, always in love with fashion. There is not one type of beauty. Fashion shows our present, past, and what could be.”
“It took nearly 9 months to construct,” says Loriot, who used his modeling experiences to help shape the exhibit’s look and feel at times, of a runway. “The sound, music, video, animated installations were [also] a great challenge.” Many of the mannequins “speak,” with faces created by technologically ingenious high-definition audiovisual projections. A dozen celebrities, including Gaultier himself, model Ève Salvail, and bass player Melissa Auf der Maur, have lent their faces and their voices to this project.
Jean Paul Gaultier (French, b. 1952). Corset-style body suit with garters, 1990, Duchess satin. Worn by Madonna during the “Metropolis” (“Express Yourself”) sequence of the Blond Ambition World Tour (1990). Collection of Madonna, New York. (Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Christine Guest)
The Brooklyn presentation features Gaultier costumes never before seen in New York, such as items lent by Madonna, including her iconic corsets from the Blond Ambition World Tour (1990) and costumes from the Confessions Tour (2006) and the MDNA Tour (2012). Costumes created for Kylie Minogue, Pedro Almodovar’s Kika(1994) and Bad Education (2004), and Luc Besson’s Fifth Element (1996) are also be part of the exhibition.
The show is organized into seven themes: The Odyssey, The Boudoir, Muses, Punk Cancan, Skin Deep, Metropolis, and Urban Jungle. The Muses section, unique to the Brooklyn Museum exhibit, features photos and pieces worn by some of Gaultier’s muses, including 1990s male model Tanel Bedrossiantz (who also helped dress some of the exhibit’s mannequins) and more recently Crystal Renn, a former plus size model.
Brooklyn Museum is the only East Coast venue for the international exhibition, which will be on display through Feb. 23, 2014.
The exhibition is accompanied by the first major monograph book on the French designer, The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk, published by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, under the direction of Thierry-Maxime Loriot. The 424-page catalogue contains more than 550 illustrations and photographs; an introductory essay by Suzy Menkes, Fashion Editor of The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune; 50 exclusive interviews conducted by Loriot with celebrities and collaborators of the couturier (Helen Mirren, Nicole Kidman, Madonna, Catherine Deneuve, Martin Margiela, Dita Von Teese, and Marion Cotillard among others); and two interviews with Gaultier himself.
Upcoming Events on The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk