[audience cheering]
[motorcycle revving]
[upbeat dance music]
- [Jean Paul] My name is Jean Paul Gaultier [in French]
And you will see my fall-winter collection, 1995.
[upbeat dance music]
- [Laird] I'm Laird Persson.
I'm the Archive Editor at vogue.com,
so it's very important to trace how designers, over time
have reacted to technology and ideas of future in fashion.
To me, this is a seminal show that speaks to those topics.
[Jen Paul] In that period I was doing the clothes for
Fifth Element, which you can see also in my collection.
It's not The Fifth Element,
but I was into that spirit, you know.
[Laird] It opened with two women on a motorbike coming in.
[Jean Paul] And she was the queen of the pike.
The dyke on a bike.
And she has on her back
the girl that was a DJ and doing the music.
[upbeat dance music]
- [Claudia] Jean Paul wants you to start with the show,
it means that you really represent the whole thing.
And I was quite pregnant, I must say.
With a tattoo on my tummy.
Look at me! I'm really enjoying the moment.
- [Laird] '95 was still the era of supermodels,
which was this outrageous, engaging, but almost unrealistic
view of beauty.
- [Jean Paul] I wanted to show all the beauty and
the attitude.
I was doing almost all the time,
next girl casting.
There is one that will come after the black girl
with a told that they swings a sweet of thunder.
Super tall.
- [Laird] He celebrated club culture.
He celebrated difference.
You had all sorts of characters, plus you had supers
like Helena and Naomi.
And then you had Carmen Dell'Orefice as a falconier
who had been around in the golden age of haute couture.
Carmen was discovered roller skating in New York City
and brought up to Vogue.
And she basically grew up in the pages of the magazine.
- [Carmen] He asked me if I was comfortable with a falcon
and I said well I've had three husbands.
I think I can handle a falcon. [laughing]
My mother had macaws and parrots,
so I'm used to crazy birds. [laughing]
[upbeat dance music]
- [Jean Paul] Estelle Lefebure which was like a top,
super top was part of the with Naomi and Linda,
like such was truly very good and she was pregnant too.
- [Estelle] Jean Paul during the fitting told me
I want you to be beautiful and feel extraordinary beautiful
and are you okay if we show your belly.
And I'm like yeah of course.
My daughter Ilona, I saw her doing the runway
of Jean Paul after 23 years. [laughing]
She did the first one in my belly
and the second by herself.
[upbeat dance music]
- [Laird] The models are not made to look beautiful
they're beautifully disheveled.
Their beauty is abstracted through the makeup,
a sort of eye patches and unexpected lip colors.
- [Jean Paul] It was Topolino who did the makeup for me.
I wanted something like kind of digital let's say,
like digital makeup, blue makeup on pink hair.
Punky, let's say, even the hair was between
the dreadlocks and the Marie Antoinette.
It's a mix of time.
- [Laird] There's also a BDSM element to all of this.
You have Linda Evangelista in a ruffle front shirt
though made of leather with a corset that ties
in back to create a bustle effect.
The whip we'll see Gaultier bringing over to Hermes
when he is named creative director many years later.
- [Jean Paul] I was also inspired in that collection
by Uta Cirelli, which she is like reminds me
when I was adolescent of a painter that make optical art.
I wanted to make a body, the shape of a body
in the vast reality of optical wear.
[upbeat dance music]
- [Laird] Gaultier's perfect woman is someone like
Rossy de Palma.
Someone who wouldn't fit a sort of barbie doll mold.
- [Jean Paul] Rossy de Palma is one of my muse, let's say.
And she's a character, she's like herself,
like a Picasso, you know her face.
I like her dimensions, she's art in real life.
So lively and so unassuming of beauty which is very
strange and very different from the other.
She is one of the first that was assuming her face
that was completely different.
- [Rossy] They have so much expectation
because a lot of people want to come.
People was killing each other to come in.
I want, I want, I want, there's too much people.
He's much more into this freedom of the unique person
that you're gonna be.
It was a game playing in front of the photographers
and you would have the time to do it.
The shows now are very calibrated with timing.
But in those times it was free.
If I want to stay 30 second, I stay 30 seconds.
If I don't wanna stay, I don't stay.
- [Carmen] One of the reasons I never did do many
fashion shows is because I could never do the walk
that was in, and they didn't want what I could do
which was a straight walk from the old fashioned
fashion where you just held a little card in front of you
walked a straight line, look ahead.
He allows everybody their individuality.
You see me turning slowly and just walkin'.
- [Laird] This is not look ahead, don't smile,
don't interact, get it over with, defile.
- [Jean Paul] I have also in the collection,
like to make it warm.
It was a winter collection and there is a cat girl
and a big parka.
Enormous back, got long, long, long,
like evening and underneath you see the zipper.
It's a pocket, it's like a biker effect.
- [Laird] Some of the embroideries were actually based
on a computer chip.
In 1995 we're not really in a full internet age.
To take an ancient technique, one that's associated
with decorativeness, often femininity is pretty fantastic.
Included in this cyber couture show are these
sort of breast plates armor, they look a little bit like
football padding but they are embellished with beads,
but they also light up.
- [Jean Paul] You see others with electronic thing
but if it was twentieth century, so it's all very Greece.
Like the roof of the opalite.
Green oxidation of the copper.
- [Laird] The idea of a zip back
on a nineteenth century gown adds a sense of humor.
So you're time traveling back and forward and sideways
and all ways, all at once.
Another dystopian element that we see are face masks,
as if to ward off a noxious fume.
- [Jean Paul] In Japan when you are very polite
you put the mask when you are sick, like not to give
your sickness to the other.
So I was into that, I was coming back from Japan.
I says it's good, we can make it also like in some way
more feminine so you know what I put a mask is that
they fit very well the shape of the face on there
like lipstick but it was like a crystal red crystals
that make the lips like red lipstick.
Tanel was on this and he still is kind of my muse,
you know he was special physique, was not at all classical.
He was very masculine, is very masculine.
He walks in a way that was inspired by some big girls
of the eighties, like Linda
and Christy Turlington, et cetera.
But before even he knows that he was already walking
like a top model.
He has a super flair and look what he has.
What I was doing to my grandmother,
it is like you know who makes dryers hair
- [Laird] Some of the models had these hats,
made of the same nylon that they were blowing up
with hand held hairdryers which was pretty hysterical.
- [Jean Paul] In reality it's flat,
and when you put the air,
poof it become like an erection let's say, some singer,
more phallic maybe, I don't know, but it's quite strange.
So we made the shape a little different from the real one
from the old ladies you know.
The idea was more like an arrive for ski, in your house
you have all those things that is special inside,
on which I want, so we can for winter or things like that.
Why not start with a spa tea, spa tea, spa tea,
I can make it light for evening or something funny.
- [Laird] Gaultier's not a fashion dictator.
He's able to play with tradition because he knows
tradition and knows the craft behind the tradition
which makes his message all the more potent.
Gaultier's perhaps the most camp of designers.
Camp as we learned through the mid exhibition
is a many splendored and many layered thing.
But it is looking at something as what it is
and what it is not, sort of at the same time.
- [Carmen] Jean Paul was one of the first to design
for all shape women, all color skin.
There was no one look that represented his clothes
and it is the acceptance of the human being.
- [Estelle] His creativity and his tenderness
and kindness is rare, really.
- [Carmen] If I had come in with a broken arm
and a cast he would have integrated that into the show.
- [Laird] There are never victims in Gaultier's world, ever.
His vision of difference is a celebratory one.
His vision of women of a woman is a strong woman.
- [Man speaking] Noodles in the same soup.
We are always a big family.
- [Jean Paul] The total atmosphere was different I think
but quite nice collection.
[upbeat dance music]