"The finest clothing made is a person's skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this." ~Mark Twain
Recently I attended the Jean Paul Gautier exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
.
What a fascinating show it was! The costumes themselves were spectacular but the special mannequin display was what got my attention. I heard someone beside me say: “I don’t want to see this. “It's gusting! terrible! kitsch!”
The speaker was a mannequin, with a real model’s living features projected onto its face, and the model’s voice looping from a speaker. The video faces (developed by Montreal artists Denis Marleau and Stéphanie Jasmin) confront you, look away, talk and sometimes even sing. Fabulous!
Gautier has produced sculptured costumes for Madonna starting with her infamous cone bra for her 1990 Blond Ambition Tour, and designed the wardrobe for her 2006 Confessions Tour.
Displace: Humour thrives on incongruity and so does Gaultier. He pulls materials out of their usual context, makes luxurious gowns from denim and camouflage cloth. He builds a huge wedding dress by deconstructing a hussar’s white greatcoat, stitches epaulets to hips and regimental braids to skirt, then tops the look with a Plains Indian headdress, feathers marching down to the floor. He combines a tartan skirt with a top patterned like a circuit board, with a reflective seat-belt clasp in place of a jeweled kilt pin.
Simplify: For all his riotous ornament, Gaultier is obsessed with basic geometries, from the circles and cones of Madonna’s torpedo bustier (the show’s most famous image, prefigured by a juvenile first draft on a teddy bear) to the lattice of squares and rectangles that forms the bodysuit and airy crown of one of his virginal saints. Gaultier came into his own when punk was new, and he maps punk’s reductive spirit onto an older fixation with architectural simples. The two meet most vividly in a punk outfit fashioned from a cinched rectangular garbage bag, with jewellery made from the circles and cylinders of tin cans.
Project: The inside goes on the outside, as it does with constructivist architecture. Gaultier prints clinging jersey with the red and blue outline of the circulatory system, or the meaty plan of the muscles. He puts the skin on the dress, beading the nipples and the pubic hair, fastening red false nails on the gloves that are fused with the whole outfit. He pulls the bones out, beads them in black, and sticks them like superhero armour onto a costume that leaves plenty of real skin showing under the hips. Orbital dress forms stand out from the body like cages, a burlesque of the crinolines under 19th-century skirts.
Pattern: Organic patterns show up mainly as plays on some animal form: the snaky cage that writhes over a skirt, the cascades of feathers that give a soft belle époque shape to many gowns, the love of reptile patterning. One labour-intensive gown is fronted by a beaded simulation of an entire leopard skin (construction time: 1,060 hours), its glassy eyes peeping just under the décolletage. Curiously, Gaultier shows almost no interest in floral patterns. The embroidered blooms of his Russian-inspired outfits, like the subdued garlands in his lace, refer to floral traditions in dress, not to plants and flowers themselves.
Astonish: Gaultier insists that clothes should stand out and express something, of ourselves, of our ideas of beauty and of the world around us. You don’t have to wear these designs to feel their impact. They leave you with a wider, wilder notion of the art of couture, and of the second skins we actually do or could wear.
The show will continue on touring to museums in Dallas, San Francisco, Madrid and Rotterdam.
The show will continue on touring to museums in Dallas, San Francisco, Madrid and Rotterdam.
