The gall of Gaultier
The Day Before: Jean Paul Gaultier
Explore the creative genius of French fashion's enfant terrible.
Remember Milla Jovovich's skimpy white 'costume' in The Fifth Element that looked as if she'd escaped from the set of The Mummy before they'd had time to finish the bandaging? Or Victoria Abril's wacky outfits in Pedro Almodóvar's Kika? Or Madonna's cones? Who else but the bad boy of French haute couture - Jean Paul Gaultier - could have pulled these designs off?
Presented as part of the L'Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival's Cultural Program, Jean Paul Gaultier on Film is a boutique season exploring the designer's influence on - and by - cinema.
It was Jacques Becker's 1944 film Falbalas, set in a Parisian fashion house with costumes designed by couturier Marcel Rochas, that inspired Gaultier to become a designer; he remembers that when he first watched the film, "it was like a magic world had opened before me".
Falbalas screens alongside Les Falbalas de Jean Paul Gaultier, a documentary retracing the designer's private and professional development directed by Tonie Marshall (who just happens to be the daughter of Micheline Presle, the leading starlet in Falbalas).
Also screening is Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's The City of Lost Children for which Gaultier designed all the costumes. Which seems fitting, really, considering Caro and Jeunet's own unique aesthetics (as Caro once said, "The biggest talent of Jean-Paul Gaultier was how he was able to integrate his personal vision within the universe of the film. We both believe in the extremes of beauty").
Finally, get a fly-on-the-wall glimpse at the method behind Gaultier's madness with Loïc Prigent's The Day Before: Jean Paul Gaultier. After trailing Karl Lagerfeld and Marc Jacobs with his candid camera, Prigent captures the chaos - and the creativity - behind Gaultier's 2010 Autumn/Winter haute couture collection. "I want to understand what the process is about," Prigent explains. "It's a circus, but it's an interesting circus". And Gaultier is its unconventional ringmaster.
Published Thursday, 11 March 2010
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