“The Maestro of Mayhem,” by Georgina Howell was first published in the March 1991 issue of Vogue.
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The Maestro of Mayhem: Jean Paul Gaultier, fashion’s bad boy and Madonna’s favorite, shocks, entertains, and influences. But behind his wild ideas, Georgina Howell finds a man who can really cut a suit
Behind the sort-porn movies and the tourist cafés of the Champs Elysées, the Jean Paul Gaultier collection is about to begin.
It may not be Saint Laurent, but there are those for whom this weird spectacle is the only show in town. Diana Ross, for instance. Behind her peppermint white grin and panda sunglasses, she declares herself hot for the fun to begin. She’s still buzzing after a 3:00 A.M. exit from the restaurant Jezebel with Azzedine Alaïa and a heavy day’s spending with Iman and Grace Jones. Over by the curtains, a couple of ticketless fans have been collared by security trying to slip into the dressing rooms. Along the catwalk the photographers genially jostle a new English colleague out of his ten square inches of red carpet. Photographer Roxanne Lowit fills him in: “Gaultier is Vivienne Westwood plus clout and admiration.”
But it is backstage that the full flavor of the Gaultier mise-en-scene can really be appreciated. In these dilapidated caves where sequined showgirls once glued on their eyelashes and shook out their ostrich feathers, a scene akin to a Fellini movie is being enacted. Through a black tunnel of metal girders, a man and a woman in matching candy-floss pink trouser suits and Marie Antoinette ringlets waltz in slo-mo, eye to eye, while Herb Ritts photographs. Silhouetted against this brightly lit vignette, a couple of boy models kiss passionately.
“It’s a better way to see it than out front,” says Madonna, leaning against the grimy wall with her pouting, Roman-nosed boyfriend, model Tony Ward. He wears a mesh vest and sarong. She wears a skintight black shift and a rope of black beads. A headband frames the famous cream velvet heart-shaped face. The magenta Cupid’s bow mouth works on french fries out of a paper cup.
“This is dinner in Paris!” says Madonna wryly, offering Tony a fry. “But it’s what we eat at home too.”
Fashion editors sitting opposite Madonna complain she has been knickerless all week, but now she is on her best behavior. She tells Tony, “You took your waistcoat off too fast. You want to do it slow . . .” and confides, “This is my absolute favorite show. Always, always Gaultier, long before he did my world tour.”
Beyond the negative force field of her bodyguards, three boys sit giggling on each other’s laps. Ben from Brussels, a lightweight kick boxer from the RD Sporting Club in the boulevard St. Denis, says, “I am damn good model, but if my nose is bust I will make anozzor work,” before disappearing completely under the genial six-foot-five-inch Max Rosa, the Brazilian assistant manager of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and, thanks to Gaultier, the once-famous First Man in a Skirt. Perching on his enormous knees is little Thierry Perez, blowing excited kisses at co-model Rossy “the Nose” de Palma, one of the stars of Pedro Almódovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.
The maestro himself, arriving with a bellow of laughter and a semaphore of hand gestures, is bowing to kiss the hand of the woman who makes all the other models look ordinary. Mme Evelyne Tremois, a seventy-year-old grandmother, is a graceful bourgeois lady in turquoise cashmere with an Hermès scarf and a good handbag over her wrist. Gaultier, who is always looking for what he calls “charisma” in any shape or form, found her at a publicity-stunt open-casting session last summer at the French department store Galeries Lafayette. Now that he shows his clothes only on couples, Gaultier pairs her with her catwalk “husband” for the day, twenty-eight-year-old Scott Benoit.
“I heard that M. Gaultier was looking for a mannequin between the ages of seventy and seventy-seven,” she tells me serenely, removing her kid gloves. “Life has made me a little sad recently. I thought, why not?” She moves imperceptibly closer. “I think he wants me to wear one of those cotton wool wigs. I said I didn’t think so.”
Jean Paul, with great politeness, continues to greet his models in order of precedence. A noisy, stocky, effervescent figure whose shaved dark head sprouts a tuft of peroxided hair, he is also a terrific charmer, a deft and courteous manager of the unruly, mismatched tribe of Gaultier people. He kisses the very pregnant Leslie Navarras, and then a model friend from the days when he worked at Cardin, Anna Pawlowski, before embracing the irrepressible Sergio Viana, dressed as Adam for the show’s opening. Sergio, wearing only pink tights and a codpiece made of a coiled metal serpent and a butterfly tremblant, tiptoes as he talks to Gaultier, who clumps around like a marine in heavy strapped boots and a T-shirt.
“I’m pretty much the star of the show,” Sergio tells me, tossing back his glossy waist-length hair. “Jean Paul saw my book and he just loved me.” He licks his lips. “It’s a little scary being in the spotlight. I’m a surfer and an actor back home. I’ve been on Good Morning America. And I’m still so young . . . only twenty-one!” He stoops to straighten his tights, and as he does so his expression suddenly changes to a rictus of agony. “Aaaaach!” he screams. It seems that part of his anatomy has been caught twixt serpent and butterfly spring.
Abandoning young Sergio with tears in his eyes, I pull up alongside Cadet Gaultier, who is stamping his boots on cigarette ends for his barefoot models, miming biting his nails, and giving off bursts of confidence and energy.
“This is not only to make theater,” he shouts, holding his hands out as if supporting a tray and moving them violently to and fro. “It pushes the style content of the clothes. Here in France we’re paralyzed by chic!
“If there wasn’t such a thing as a fashion show, I wouldn’t be in fashion!”
His eye rests on a bubbly blond in a tulle tutu smoking a pipe, and on Ben, struggling into a see-through romper suit with matador embroidery, peaked cap, and mittens. The designer who has dressed men in gingham and open-toed high-heeled sneakers and Madonna in crucifixes and sex-shop corsetry for her Blond Ambition tour gives a snort of laughter.
“Where does it say, This fabric is for a woman, this for a man?” He thumps his chest comically with his fist, a logical man flummoxed. “Like saying, This vegetable is for girls to eat, this for boys. Ridiculous! We did equality. We did toy boys. Now we go one step more . . . . And it’s not bad for the fashion editors,” he shouts over his shoulder, marching off to begin the lineup. “It gives them a few ideas!”
His tone suggests they could use it. Slow critical acceptance and a waning enthusiasm for shock couture have left their mark on the otherwise sunny disposition of this perpetually young thirty-eight-year-old designer. Fashion editors had certain reservations about men in chiffon and women with breast horns. It took them some time to see one-shouldered tuxedos and thigh-high laced boots for boys. They had problems with bracelets made of cat-food cans and suits with a trouser on one leg and a skirt on the other. After a titanic struggle and five collections, Gaultier found himself twelve thousand dollars in debt. He did not give up, but in the photographic “magazine” in which he has chronicled his life story, A nous deux la mode, he does not spare the French fashion editors who trashed his early shows.
The turning point came in 1979, when the Japanese company Kashiyama backed him for the sixties-inspired James Bond collection that finally made his name. But he still feels the sting of nonacceptance. His video with Jean-Baptiste Mondino was a comic send-up of an interview with Britain’s pretty but prim fashion presenter, Selina Scott, mixed with snatches of Rai, Edith Piaf, and the grunts and cries of farmyard animals.
“A naughty boy?” says Mondino, the director of Yves Saint Laurent’s Jazz fragrance commercial who has recently revived his notoriety with Madonna’s borderline “Justify My Love” video. “An enfant terrible? Not a bit! He is not just a performer. He’s all equipped. He has done his homework. He could be a regular couturier. He knows ‘Aow tou dou zat’—which is what we called his house video. He understands how to handle big projects and all the politics.”
Toward the end of the eighties, what interested the French underground most was the mixing of opposites. The three wicked witches of Paris were Gaultier, Mondino, and Jean-Paul Goude, the graphics guru of Grace Jones and the stylist and photographer of Jungle Fever. Together and separately this trio cooked up enough sexual, social, and cultural shocks to rearrange the world through the medium of the young.
“Paris has always been a good place to step back and analyze,” says Mondino. "We’ve been playing around with the differences between man and woman, rich and poor, black and white—it’s very democratic! Martine Sitbon, Prince, and Mike Tyson suddenly seemed to us to be key people. Meanwhile, Jean Paul was turning fashion into style, using music, video, sex-shop paraphernalia, movies, and the technical stuff that sports firms like Nike were churning out.”
At the heart of it all, says Mondino, striking an attitude, was the attempt to prepare society for the day when the poor will take over the world.
“Maybe Goude and I have done as much as we can. But Jean Paul has more to do, because he works through fashion. And he moves faster than any of us.”
In the Galerie Vivienne, a picturesque arcade at the back of the challenging Gaultier shop with its pissoir changing rooms and patched cement floor, I was encouraged to examine the clothes on the hanger instead of the catwalk. I discovered that without the visual hype and the pretty boys, the clothes were indeed impeccably made and even justified Gaultier’s perennial claim of being obsessed by traditional tailoring. There were many pin-striped tailleurs that appeared to have been through the mill in one way or another—chopped off, oddly gathered like ruched curtains, or snipped at with gardening shears. I also discovered that the champion of the poor sells coats for around $1,600, T-shirts for $160.
Just then Gaultier galloped in, swapped a few jokes with his staff, cried “Bon!” five times, and threw himself down at a glass-and-metal table, ready for interrogation. He wore his usual striped T-shirt, black blazer with back tag, jeans, and boots. He also sported an enormous waterproof wristwatch.
“This watch is a big lie!” he said, seeing it had caught my attention. “It says I am sportif. I say I am not. But it was given me by a good friend, and I love the ruched strap. Pretty, no?”
He rubbed the stubble at the back of his neck and fidgeted in his chair. “Did you like the collection? A show gives the spirit and the direction, but that’s not enough. Sometimes there is a show. Sometimes there are clothes. I try to do both.” More like a video than a fashion parade, each of his shows has a story and a title: The Last Five Minutes, perhaps, or Pretty Mister, even Of the Solemn Communion in Paradise. In one collection, he played with the idea of White Russians escaping to Paris with their jewelry and formal clothes and then taking jobs as taxi drivers and manicurists. He designed another entirely around the image of a concierge.
“I grew up watching those old films of the forties, with Arletty and Marcel Carné, and always the stock character of the concierge in a printed pinafore, with an old cardigan, a scarf, and a cigarette stuck to her bottom lip!” He snorted with laughter. “I adored the look.
“And in a strange sort of way, I’m only doing what Chanel did before me. She dressed duchesses like maids, in a plain black dress with a white collar.” He leaned forward, hands flat on the glass. “Between us, the chic doesn’t come from the clothes, it comes from the person themselves. Or not!”
Together with his cheaper Junior Gaultier line, his label now does an annual $120 million turnover; he has a half dozen of his own shops and also sells from boutiques in big department stores. The new collection, 1 + 1 = 1, is themed around the marriage of male and female garments, with sexist clichés swapping gender, garment by garment. Business suits become shoulderless or backless, the girl’s hem turns into a man’s tailcoat or even an umbrella. Some of the clothes are simply for fun, like the ruched nylon wedding frock with a 22-meter train, shown in a pink glow with a tweeting bird sound track and dangling plaster putti. This probably reminds Jean Paul of the wedding dresses he once had to design for Pronuptia. At the rehearsal for the show he laughed so much at the bridal vignette that he fell off the catwalk into the front row.
“I wanted to show both sexes together five years ago, but the men’s fashion industry was still very underdeveloped. Now it’s possible to have as large a range of clothes for men, with clothes for seduction and for evening.”
As far as Gaultier is concerned, there are still taboos to break, but he says that when he included a nunlike figure in a recent show he wasn’t trying to be aggressive. “It was a symbol of purity,” he said. “Tout simple!”
“You’re not being ingenuous?”
He exploded with laughter, acknowledged the remotest possibility with a sidelong glance, and bellowed in English, “I seenk eet’s bee-u-tee-ful!”
Fashion editors call his clothes closet classics. The drama and tawdry exuberance of his fashion shows obscure their basis in deft coat-and-jacket tailoring, but his inventive mind cannot leave them there. He applies the imaging and technical advances of sportswear’s body hype, uses attention grabbers the way he does for rock musicians, and transposes finishes from one field to another, distressing fabrics the way furniture makers do, to add a patina that is the opposite of gloss. Then he distributes his ideas by hot line to the young—expanding fashion’s audience into areas other designers cannot reach. He picks up on street fashion and takes it to another stage, where the street yearns for it but can’t afford it.
The larger commercial world of fashion is intrigued, but Gaultier may never become a billionaire on the scale of Ralph Lauren or Calvin Klein. All the same, in a world of recycled fashion ideas, Jean Paul’s originality is a big commodity. A hungry market has learned to grab at the profusion of ideas he scatters negligently throughout his shows. Many, he says, came to him on the pavements of London and Paris.
But Jean Paul can no longer travel by metro without being inundated by fans, all of whom want something from him—conversation, work, inspiration, and to model in his shows. Now he goes by car, or he half runs, waving, grinning, shouting “Hul- lo!” but putting on speed until he outpaces even his most persistent admirers in his seven-league DM boots.
“Fashion has broken down into a number of different propositions, so it’s important to watch what’s happening. The object used to be to dress a certain social set and to dress the poor to look as though they were rich. Now fashion adapts itself to reality. Different sociocultural groups have their own way of living, their own food, their own decor. For each group there is a designer.”
Now that no TV fashion spectacular, AIDS drive, or international fashion event seems complete without the magnetic Gaultier presence, I asked if cult success had distanced him from the street.
“I do have to keep my eyes and ears open,” he conceded. “I don’t need to be an artist, I need to be a voyeur, reflecting what I see around me.”
One of his recent collections was inspired by Barbès, an ethnic ratatouille of North African, Caribbean, and Oriental cultures in the immigrant eighteenth arrondissement. “We all wear American jeans, buy Chinese takeout. Food tells the whole story,” added Gaultier, punctuating his delivery with flat-handed Egyptian gestures. “Nouvelle cuisine—why? Japanese, Cajun, Mexican—everyone can say why!”
His own diet continues to be irreducibly French and includes his favorite brains and horse meat that his mother cooked for family meals in the Paris suburb of Arcueil. But life is too chaotic for him to be serious about anything—even cooking. Tonight he will go back to his house in a Pigalle back street, the house where Madonna goes when she disappears from view. Behind a gate and a garden he will lie in a bedroom that successive domestic cleaners have declined to enter, restlessly flicking the remote controls of four televisions, pressing the fast-forward button of his VCR—“The love scenes are so slow, they ought to speed them up instead!”—and thumbing through the scores of international magazines that cover the floor.
“Nobody is allowed to throw anything away,” said Gaultier. “Things have got so bad I can’t walk from the door to the bed anymore. I have to run down the corridor and jump!”
There is a gym, but no one can find a physical trainer with a personality strong enough to make Gaultier do his exercises. There is a pearlized blue fifties Formica table and chairs upside down in the hall. He bought them in Miami and had them shipped over but now doubts they go with the decor—or lack of it. Everything is in a continuous process of change. The death of his partner, Francis Menuge, has left a black hole in his life, but his large, boisterous personality remains undiminished.
He published the story of his life, A nous deux la mode, largely so he wouldn’t have to tell the story of his life at every interview. Modeled on the cheap photo-romances French teenagers pick up at station kiosks, it is a hop and skip through a suburban boy’s life, the story of a love affair between a boy and fashion. It’s also the least pompous, most entertaining press biography ever produced. The glossy cover depicts a blue-eyed ingenue Jean Paul, plucked, shaved, powdered, and lipsticked, jug-handle ears at right angles to his prickly postpunk flattop, within a misty circlet of flowers.
Dear Reader, your heart will bleed for the fashion-mad boy whose father wanted him to be a teacher, thrill to see him employed on his eighteenth birthday by no less a person than Pierre Cardin, and ache for the twenty-four-year-old virtuoso whose first independent collection attracted a total audience of sixteen. It tells you almost everything you want to know, though not about Jean Paul’s nervous breakdown nor about the death of Francis. Carefully chosen actors take over the family roles. There is his mother, slipping the brains and horse steaks onto the table wearing her indoor uniform of blouse and slip, and his accountant father, shouting “Grotesque!” through his bristling mustache at his son’s inadequacy. We pity the wreck of the teddy bear he deformed with breasts, hair dye, and lipstick, and warm to Mamie, the beloved grandmother who sheltered him when he dodged school and taught him fortune-telling and hairdressing.
“I loved my blazer and my anorak,” Jean Paul remembered, turning over the page on which, as a schoolboy of nine, he tells his classmates, “One could put up with the teacher if only she were better dressed.”
“But I adored my communion robe, all in white.” He gave a bray of laughter so explosive that all voices in the adjoining office suddenly fell quiet. “It was my very first dress!”
Much water has flowed under the bridge since then. The final pages document an end-of-collection flurry of embraces and congratulations for Gaultier the showman. Gaultier the designer and businessman is now to be found, many weeks of the year, on the flight paths between Milan, Paris, and Tokyo, where his main partner is still his first backer, Kashiyama.
A bell rang suddenly and we both glanced around. Then Gaultier started to slap at his wrist like a man demented by a cloud of gnats. It was one of the alarms on his enormous watch, and he had no idea how to silence it. While he swatted buttons, other things happened in the studio. A film star called person-to-person from a phone booth. A television company sent a messenger to say it was ready to film in the shop. There were urgent faxes from Japan and Italy, and an assistant warned that a couple of fans were hovering in the street, dressed to the nines, waiting to be discovered.
He leapt to his feet with a scrape of the chair and a crash of papers to the floor. He said goodbye very charmingly. Then he was gone, the whole office vibrating as he clumped downstairs three steps at a time. •