Jean Paul Gaultier · Fashion on Acid

Madonna corset costume sketch featuring cone bras for men.

About five or six weeks ago I made it to the last day of the Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. The place was swarming with fashionistas, tastemakers, passive fashion fanatics, photographers, eccentrics and anti-fashionistas alike. The exhibit had many of Gaultier's signature designs up on display. Some of these legendary threads were draped over animated mannequins, expressed in video format, original Gaultier sketches or featured in monumental photographs. 

You didn't need to wander around for too many seconds before you found the obvious element that separates Gaultier from other haute couture designers. What I found particularly inviting about Gaultier's designs is the philosophic mindset that he projects on his avant-garde style of fashion. He is an avant-garde trail-blazer in the fashion world when it comes to pushing the stylish envelope into transcendental androgynous terrain. Gaultier is a master at blending and merging the sexes through fashion. He melts away stringent rules, mindsets and borders and unifies everything through the fabric of space, time and fashion.

I respect individualities and I like particularities. I mix and match, collect, twist, and crossbreed codes. Past, present, here, elsewhere, masculine, feminine, remarkable, humdrum—it all coexists.  — Jean Paul Gaultier

When I look at some of Gaultier's work I automatically juxtapose his fashion philosophy to boundary-dissolving psychedelic trips I've had in the past. There is one strange, but particular trait that pierces through both, the psychedelic experience and Gaultier's fashion philosophy, and that's the sense of boundary-dissolution. I know, you might be thinking to yourself, "that term is so overused and has lost its scintillating significance throughout the many years of its overuse." I would agree, especially because everybody seems to be using it these days. Almost every time I hear this overused term, I hear it being used unintentionally, unconsciously, and, perhaps, unknowingly. However, I'm using the term and concept of "boundary-dissolution" in none of those ways. I'm using it in its truest and most boundary-dissolving definition possible—to the point where you can't discern yourself from the words on the screen.

Before the full-blown boundary-dissolution happens and the plants, people, trees, skies, moon and stars look back at you like the person in the mirror, this trickster lesson begins to manifest itself in trickier ways. If you've ever taken LSD at an underground acid rave or wandered around festival marketplaces at night while under the weird influence, you might know what I'm talking about. You begin to hear weirdly pitched androgenic voices, you come across winking transexuals, and difficult-to-figure undercover cross-dressers most certainly will spill into your square reality (reminiscent of the blouse wearing psychedelic rock stars of the 60's (i.e. Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.)). 

Sexual energies latent in everything around you, inanimate and animate, begin to emanate and swallow you into them. Your body begins to mimic liquid, reminding you life is liquid. You begin to feel the flow of prana and you decide to become and go with the flow of prana in your newly realized liquid form. You begin to move the way your soul would move if it wasn't heavily burdened with a body (which may or may not be particularly perfect for an acid rave). It feels like you woke up to the snap of a cosmic finger, and once you wake up your eyes feel like their mischievously twinkling like stars up against the dark, pitch black night sky. When this begins to happen, you know you're tripping big time. Reality feels so malleable and your wand-like fingers can do with it as you wish. (Maybe, kind of like Steve Jobs did with touchscreen iPhone?) 

Signature Gaultier corset.

The allegory present here is that of the non-dual identity of the soul. Through these experiences, I've come to maybe understand that the soul doesn't play by the rules of the binary game. The soul truly transcends the game of duality that all of the biological beings of the material world are relegated to. The soul lives in the realm of non-duality—the soul isn't masculine or feminine—it doesn't play by the rules of this OR that, it plays by the rules of this AND that. When you get that, you get that the soul is androgynous. So when Jean Paul Gaultier expresses this through the language of fashion, I find it fascinating. Fashion acts as an extension of language. It might even behave as a visualized form of language; which is interesting, to say the least. Especially when designers such as Gaultier manage to hypersexualize the hell out of fashion.

Haute-couture role-play?

In the '80's Gaultier was known as the only high fashion designer who was intimately involved in selecting out the models who would wear his designs down his runway show. He understood that the rule goes both ways. Sure, clothes makes the man, as the popular idiom goes, but if that's the case, then it should also obviously be assumed that, man makes the clothes. 

I've compiled some pictures I took at the Gaultier Brooklyn Museum exhibit here for you. I'm also featuring two select videos of Gaultier's runway shows if you're interested in seeing some of his work in action. The quote below precisely sums up the meaning behind Gaultier's fashion world. His work truly is: fashion on acid.

Through twists, transformations, transgressions, and reinterpretations, he blurs the boundaries not only between cultures but also between the sexes, creating a new androgyny and subverting hypersexualized fashion codes. Underneath Jean Paul Gaultier's wit and irreverence lie a true free spirit and a powerful message for society. Going beyond the exceptional expertise and technical acumen involved in haute couture, he offers an open-minded vision of society: a crazy, sensitive, funny, sassy world in which everyone is invited to assert his or her own identity—a world without discrimination.
 —Brooklyn Museum

The video below is from the Spring Summer 2014 Gaultier fashion show. It's fun, stylish, loose, and original, as anything you would expect from the creative French fashion designer. The parody judges will probably fill you with some laughs. Of course, Gaultier's close friend and long time muse, spanish actress Rossy de Palma, steals the show with her overwhelming theatrical antics and her ultra distinct, Picassoesque make up. 

The last video I'm featuring here is this throwback 1994 Spring Summer Gaultier fashion show; which, if you can't do the math, happened exactly two decades before the runway show video above. It's interesting to see exactly how much the art form has evolved and changed over the course of two decades of haute couture. By the looks of it, the 90's were clearly happening. According to this fashion show production, Gaultier undoubtedly came across viles of liquid acid in the early 90's, either while wandering around the Bohemian streets of Montmartre, or while partying at the German Love Parade, the result gives way to the same. This merging of psychedelic and tribal fashion tastes is something you'd expect to see at places like Ozora or BOOM Festival, for example, not at a haute couture runway show. Gaultier is indubitably a loaded ZOOMDOUT head, so, much respect and applause for the man. Personally, I would love to see an evolved 90's fashion comeback, further merging its tribal elements with futuristic fashion (e.g. Channel S/S 2014). How about you? What would you like to see on the urban jungle streets? (Comments welcome below.)

In the next psychedelic fashion related blog, I'll be talking about the most futuristic fashion show the world has ever seen. Stay tuned for that. But for now, please enjoy the videos. They'll definitely manage to get you in the spring and summer type of mood.