DRESS SENSE
As I walked through the sumptuous Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, I couldn’t help but remember the blockbuster 2011 Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met. The Gaultier show suffers by comparison. Though the clothes are exquisitely crafted (many are haute couture), and the installation is vivid (with the filmed facial expressions of live models projected on blank mannequin heads), the experience lacks the emotional intensity of the McQueen show. That show was charged by the fantasy in McQueen’s work, which fused archetypical female characters (maiden, fairy, princess, witch) with archetypical cultural narratives (rape, drowning, mutation, revolution). And the presentation, chronological, was seared by the tragic fact of his death. What we saw at the Met was the complete ouevre of an artist; what we see at the Brooklyn Museum is a retrospective of an immensely skilled professional.
Both designers are showmen, who pair technical mastery with visual flamboyance. They flout conventional styles while executing their clothing with the highest traditional standards of fitting, draping and embellishment. At the Brooklyn Museum it’s starry and also instructive to see the corsets that Gaultier designed for Madonna’s stage shows. They’re kitschy, made of sparkling lurex, with cartoonishly cinched waists and pointed cups. And they are as finely wrought as jewelry, with miles of angelic, millimeter-long stitches holding strips of ribbon, elastic and boning in place. Even garments with simple profiles – a strapless gown with princess seams, flowing sailor paints with a button front – have an overwrought, byzantine quality. They’re shaped with abundant piecing and puckering.
And yet they’re not innovative in form; they’re rich renditions of standard garments. More than a dreamer, Gaultier is an intellectual, able to infuse a garment – dress, suit, jacket – with a single idea to devastating effect. At the Brooklyn show there is a black cocktail dress constructed like a skeleton, a gauzy white wedding gown that takes the shape of a West African mask, and a slithering satin evening gown modelled after a Renaissance Madonna. If McQueen’s works are fantasies erupting into form, Gaultier’s works are garments lit with ideas. They aren’t artworks, they’re clothes.
Virgins dress, by Jean Paul Gaultier, Spring/Summer 2007. Courtesy of Jean Paul Gaultier.