The Event: NGV Announce The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier

He has dressed some of Australia’s most famous women in some of the fashion world’s most outrageous looks and now the designs of Jean-Paul Gaultier are coming to Melbourne in an elaborate showcase of his work on exhibit at the NGV from October: The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk.

The exhibit will feature more than 140 of his creations, including never before seen costumes worn by Madonna and Beyonce alongside pieces lent by Kylie Minogue for viewing only by the Melbourne audience.

On the announcement of the exhibition, Makers of Melbourne spoke to curator Thierry-Maxime Loriot.

Jean-Paul Gaultier exhibition curator Thierry-Maxime Loriot at the NGV media launch 

The exhibition has so far shown in Montreal, Spain and New York, and will be visiting Paris after it comes to Melbourne – what brought his work here to Melbourne?

It’s really the fact that the museum is fantastic and the programming and the team at the NGV is very avant-garde. The space is amazing and it’s nice to share with a country that has the same open vision.

Tell us a little about the scale of the exhibition.

It’s been five years. I started work on the archives in 2009 and the exhibition itself has been travelling since 2011. To bring it together took two years of going through his archives which was very exciting but also terrifying – we had to choose from thousands of pieces and pick only the 140 or so that are on exhibit. But it’s been a unique opportunity: you would see his dresses in magazines and movies and then to see them in front of you… It’s like viewing a Picasso painting in a book and then experiencing it as you would in a gallery space.

'Metamorphose Gown' worn by Cate Blanchett to the Golden Globes 2005

Can you pick out any special pieces that speak to you?

There are so many dresses and pieces that Gaultier created that are so fantastic when you look at the craftsmanship – incredible couture pieces that are beaded and embroidered – but there were certain pieces I was dying to exhibit that we have held on to until we came to Melbourne: the dress Nicole Kidman collected her Oscar in for The Hours – the same with Kylie Minogue’s costumes. I knew we were coming to Australia so I kept them as a surprise.

What was Jean Paul like to work with?

In one word? Fantastic. What you see in pictures – that he is always smiling and happy and full of ideas – is really what he is. What you see is what you get: there are no surprises with him. He is a fantastic storyteller with so many incredible tales to tell of the relationships and inspiration behind each of his collaborations

Gaultier dresses on loan from Kylie Minogue

Will there ever be another Gaultier exhibition such as this?

I think it is something that can only be done once because even at first he never wanted to do an exhibition of his work. The form he works with is the human body so he prefers to see his work on real humans rather than mannequins. He believes normally exhibitions in museums are for dead artists, not living designers. Certainly I consider Jean Paul an artist, even if he considers himself an artisan.

The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk will be on show at the NGV from October 17, 2014, until February 8, 2015.

Jean Paul Gaultier 2014© 2014, Stéphane Sednaoui. All rights reserved

Andrej Pejić 2013 - Confession of a Child of the Century collection Jean Paul Gaultier Haute couture, autumn- winter 2012-13 © Alix Malka

Interview: Roger Leong

“Every generation wants to define itself against the previous generation. Men of my age have been wearing jeans for decades and the younger generation wanted to find themselves against that. So they won’t wear jeans – they will dress up. And that’s really where we are seeing the popularity of the Neo-Dandy movement.”

-       Roger Leong

A conversation with Roger Leong, NGV Curator Fashion and Textiles, offers a serious fashion education. Forget paying thousands for trend forecasting: the man who has spent his professional life studying fashion in an historical context knows that, when it comes to trends, it all stems from where it’s been before.

Roger: “It’s a really difficult thing to say why certain fashion’s become popular, but it is certain that fashions return – and that the cycle of men’s fashion is much longer than women’s fashion. But of all the fashion that has come and gone, my favourite era is definitely the first half of the 19th Century.”

Roger describes it as “the Pride and Prejudice period”, when men moved from wearing opulent embroidered silks draped in less sophisticated cuts (“often in fabrics more elaborate than that which was worn by the women”) to embracing the idea that clothing should enhance the male form through pattern cutting and manipulation of cloth.

Roger: “Tailoring for men walked hand-in-hand with a growing interest in athleticism – an interest in disciplining the body and creating a well-built, muscular frame, an idea that hadn’t existed before.”

He points to George Bryan “Beau” Brummell as the movement’s key personality, a man who modelled himself on Greek statues, who focussed on the fit of his clothes from the exact proportion of a pocket to the width of a lapel.

For Roger, this is where the current landscape of men’s fashion finds its most direct connection.

Roger: “That early era of tailoring really was about the refinement of the craft and I don’t think really fundamentally that things have changed much since then.”

Roger Leong, Curator – NGV International Fashion and Textiles.