The Bite Magazine Issue 17

people like me.’ It’s only now I realise that was a super-positive moment for me… it gave me a passport to make people smile.” Now, it seemed that nothing else mat- tered to Gaultier except sketching and drawing clothes; he started skipping school to draw costumes for imaginary theatre productions, and would even- tually go on to design clothes for films such as The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) and Fifth Element (1997). At the age of twelve, he saw Falbalas , a 1945 drama about a Parisian couturier, featuring the designs of Rochas, which would set him on the path to fashion. “I love that film,” he told Cobb, “the details of the couture house [and] the description of the people working there… incredible!” This made him hungry for all things ‘haute couture’: “At that time couture was in all the news- papers,” he recalled. “I especially liked Yves Saint Laurent and Cardin because they were very Parisian. I started drawing my own collections, sometimes up to three hundred sketches, and even wrote my own show reviews!” From this, he began designing dresses for his mother who had them made up by a seamstress friend and even approached Dior through another of his mother’s friends who worked in the design studio but when she showed his designs to its director Marc Bohan, it was dismissed as ‘too gaudy’ for Dior’s delicate tastes. “It may have been the fact that the faces of my models were bright orange!” Gaultier concluded. It didn’t matter in the end as the break he needed came through Pierre Cardin who offered him an opportunity. When asked what he thought Cardin saw in his drawings, the designer replied, “I don’t know! To be honest they were awful. I’m embarrassed just thinking about them. But Cardin was incredible; I hadn’t been to college, I didn’t have any references and he still gave me a job. He judged everything by himself. I suppose he could see [that] I loved fashion and recognised my obsession and energy.” One thing that Gaultier could say he had taken away from working with Cardin is, “I learnt to have pleasure and fun from Cardin, and to enjoy fashion. The most important thing with him was freedom. He was very open creatively.” From launching his first solo collection back in 1976, to designing consecutive collections in haute couture and ready- to-wear as well as iconic creations such the conical corset and the man-skirt, to his current collection today, and collab- orations with Decades, Target Australia, Swarovski, Roche Bobois and singer Beth Ditto, Jean Paul Gaultier’s creative flair remains at the top of the fashion world and we happily look forward to many, many more. www.jeanpaulgaultier.com bite designerprofile Images courtesy Imagenet