For Jean Paul Gaultier, asking what got here first, his love for trend or movie, is akin to the basic chicken-or-egg debate. As a self-proclaimed “baby of the TV” within the late Nineteen Sixties, he grew up as mesmerized by specials devoted to high fashion trend exhibits as reruns of outdated films. “I didn’t need to exit and play—I wished to observe TV,” the French designer tells Vogue, including that by 13, his sartorial calling was clear. “Once I would watch Nineteen Forties films, I understood what the imaginative and prescient of trend was speaking about, and I wished to do this. This was additionally the second André Courrèges’s graphic and inventive fashions had been all over the place. I cherished each—the basic and the trendy.”
Moderately than going to trend design faculty, Gaultier thought of idiosyncratic filmmakers like William Klein and John Waters his academics. “As a result of I discovered trend from wanting, I believe I used to be extra free,” says Gaultier. “I owe my vocation to the cinema.”
A brand new exhibition devoted to Gaultier’s lifelong ardour for movie is now on view (by way of September 30) at SCAD Lacoste, the Savannah School of Artwork and Design’s study-abroad location in Provence, France. Organized by Paris’s Cinémathèque française and the “La Caixa” Basis, “CinéMode par Jean Paul Gaultier” presents thematic vignettes showcasing movies that influenced the couturier’s collections, in addition to the costumes he designed for films, together with Kika (1993) and The Fifth Factor (1997). It’s guest-curated by Gaultier with La Cinémathèque française’s Matthieu Orléan and Florence Tissot.
The exhibition, a distilled model of the unique, introduced on the Cinémathèque française from October 6, 2021 to January 16, 2022, represents a uniquely full-circle second. Together with SCAD, the late designer Pierre Cardin was instrumental in renovating and preserving the medieval village of Lacoste, the place he was a beloved resident. It was with Cardin that Gaultier started his trend profession in 1970, and the SCAD FASH Lacoste museum, the place “CinéMode” is happening, is, the truth is, a former Cardin property.
Right here, Gaultier discusses among the exhibition’s show-stopping highlights, from movies that ignited his love of subversive storytelling and spectacle, to his personal iconic designs that introduced the silver display to the catwalk.
