Jean Paul Gaultier retired as the creative director of his storied house in 2020 because he felt there were no boundaries left to push. “Fashion was interesting when I could break rules—that was my purpose,” he says. “But at a certain age, what rules do you break?” While Gaultier’s rise in the 1970s and ’80s shocked the stuffy French establishment, today the fashion world has largely remade itself in his image. Long before street casting and inclusivity became industry buzzwords, Gaultier, who is now 73, authentically incorporated those practices into his brand. He turned his back on the traditional Parisian view of haute couture and instead found inspiration in London’s subcultures and nightlife. “They were a lot more permissive and free than in Paris,” he says. “You were judged in Paris—you had to be like everyone else.” Despite his enfant terrible reputation, Gaultier says he actually wasn’t partying all the time. “In reality, I was working, because my work was a continuation of my dream.” Gaultier has remained involved with his label, sitting front row at its couture shows, which have been overseen by a rotating cast of designers, from Haider Ackermann to Ludovic de Saint Sernin. Until now. This month, the house announced that Duran Lantink has been named the first permanent creative director to succeed Gaultier. (“I see in him the energy, audacity and playful spirit through fashion that I had at the beginning of my own journey: the new enfant terrible of fashion,” Gaultier said of Lantink in a statement.) Still, Gaultier’s creative energy is unstoppable. “I always love to create,” Gaultier says. “I have the same dreams and play the same games as I did when I was a child.”
Film was Gaultier’s introduction to the fantasy of fashion. Growing up, he saw Falbalas, a 1945 French drama about a fashion designer who romances his best friend’s fiancée. Gaultier was more entranced by the sewing than by the seduction. “I want to be like the couturier,” he remembers thinking. By age 5, Gaultier, seen above in Paris’s Jardin du Luxembourg, had already begun to develop his personal style. “I liked to be in short trousers at that time.”
Gaultier, an only child, was raised in Cachan, a suburb of Paris. As a kid, he contracted typhoid fever. While he was recovering, his maternal grandmother (above) spent time with him. He named his childhood teddy bear Nana after her. “My grandmother let me do whatever I wanted, even dress my teddy bear as a woman with a conic bra,” says Gaultier. “That was the beginning. My grandmother let me be free of everything.”
“Inspiration, for me, is something free,” says Gaultier. While working as an assistant at Jean Patou in 1972, he had to make a gown that hid a model’s curves. “It was the old silhouette. Why not show that she has breasts? The girl is beautiful. To change her morphology—I find that scandalous.” Above: Gaultier is captured in a painted photograph by his friends and frequent collaborators Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard, known as Pierre et Gilles.
Gaultier never received a formal fashion education. “I learned through reading and looking at magazines,” he says. He also devoted much of his time to sketching. “I read that Pierre Cardin was doing 300 looks for his next show, so I tried to sketch 400.” After he sent his sketches to numerous fashion houses, Cardin hired him as an assistant in 1970. Six years later, Gaultier set out on his own. Above: He’s pictured (center) with his late boyfriend and business partner, Francis Menuge (left). The bag Menuge is holding inspired a dress. “I opened the sides so you could put your arms through it,” says Gaultier. When starting a brand, “you take what you have and make it something else.”
Initially, Gaultier’s peers didn’t embrace his vision. “They didn’t try to be accepting, to be honest,” he says. “I was intrigued by people around me who were different. They dressed differently, their attitude was different, and the music was different. The couturiers at the time, apart from Yves Saint Laurent, were quite old, and they were more into business than creativity. They were too much like, ‘We have to do that! That is very elegant! That is very chic!’ I hated that.”
Gaultier, pictured dancing at Le Palace in 1986, often cast non-models for his runway shows. “On the right is a German boy that I saw in a club. I said, ‘Oh, you can be a model if you are interested and you find it funny,’ ” remembers Gaultier. “I like people who have some attitude, some little look on their face. I like the ones who have personality.”
Gaultier’s shows would come to exceed the fantasy of Falbalas, featuring celebrity guest models (including Björk and Beth Ditto) and theatrical conceits (such as a mock beauty pageant with Rossy de Palma as the judge, for his spring 2015 show). However, his earliest outings adopted a pared-back, punk attitude out of necessity: “It wasn’t just to shock; it was because I had no money.” The label was on shaky financial footing in its early years, even as his provocative offerings garnered him quite a bit of press. Above: A look from his 1979 runway show.
“I always loved the work of Thierry Mugler,” says Gaultier of his fellow designer (left). “His style was his own—he had his own identity. I was never jealous of the other couturiers. What I was doing was completely different.” Mugler and Gaultier did share a muse: Edwige Belmore (center), a Parisian nightlife icon who worked the door at the famed Parisian clubs Le Palace and Les Bains Douches. “She was the queen of punk—so impressive, so different.”
“I think the British have a good sense of self-criticism and humor,” says Gaultier, who found a second career in TV with his show Eurotrash, on Britain’s Channel 4. He attended the 1995 British Comedy Awards dressed as Princess Diana, alongside his cohost, Antoine de Caunes, who was Prince Charles. At the time, there was endless gossip about the royal couple, who were separated and heading for divorce.
Eurotrash, which Gaultier cohosted from 1993 to 1996, featured interviews with icons like Naomi Campbell and Kylie Minogue; reported segments, including one on a German home-cleaning service that employed men in thongs; and dispatches from nightlife characters such as the drag queen Lily Savage. The program mostly poked fun at continental Europe for British viewers, but it also served as a televised haven for camp and queer sensibilities. “It was truly a very good moment for me,” he says. “I had lost my partner [Menuge died of AIDS-related causes in 1990], so to do that helped me have my head somewhere else.”
