There’s more to Jean Paul Gaultier than funny bras and Eurotrash. He talks to SUSANNAH FRANKEL about styling The Fifth Element
JEAN PAUL GAULTIER’s peroxide blond crop is resting on a sea of puffed up, chintz- covered pillows in his decidedly genteel hotel suite. Clad in the requisite matelot T-shirt, stove-pipe trousers and ugly shoes – no kilt today, sadly – he points at some bottles on a dresser and announces: “They are very nice, these bottles of water, no? They look like bottles of vodka, I think. I woke up this morning feeling very thirsty, looked at them and thought to myself: `Oh my God! Vodka! You Engleesh!’ Hahahahaha!”
Gaultier is in London to talk about his collaboration with the film director Luc Besson on the sci-fi blockbuster The Fifth Element. A huge man, and every bit as cartoony in real as in TV life, he has nothing but good to say of the director – all while strangling the English language, rendered barely intelligible by his equally cartoony French accent.
“I met Luc in Cannes, at a party for Madonna,” he says. Gaultier famously created the costumes for her Blonde Ambition tour. “And I was knowing his movies and liking very much his visual point of view. So, when he asked me to do this, I was very excited.” He is also happy to confirm today that Bruce Willis is also “very nice. He knows very well his body. He is very sexy and it is not difficult to make him even more sexy. I would say to him, so, perhaps we should take these trousers in a little here [he points to the back of his right thigh], and he understood very well which part of his anatomy I wanted to emphasise. Hahahahahaha.”
Gary Oldman, meanwhile, isn’t just nice, he’s “great, great, great. Fantastic. He was frightened of nothing.” Including the Hitler haircut and unflattering disc of Plexiglas welded to the side of his face throughout the film. Besson has said that Gaultier worked on every last detail of the film, putting the finishing touches to each extra personally. The film’s climax, in particular – presided over by an intergalactic diva clad in ice-blue latex so tight-fitting it looks like porcelain – has Gaultier’s heady mix of classic glamour and street-inspired subversion, of fin de sicle elegance and sex-shop chic, stamped all over it.
“But you cannot see it!” Gaultier wails, bemoaning the length of the scene in question. “It’s only three minutes long! You cannot see the clothes! Aaaaah!” Feral beauty Milla Jovovich, clad in nothing but bandages, with her alabaster complexion, feline grace and slender frame, is the stuff fashion designers’ dreams are made of.
Gaultier is a designer who’s made something of a career out of championing less conventional concepts of beauty, casting male and female models from the street for his shows long before any other designer had dreamt of such a thing.
More than 20 years after his first show in Paris, Gaultier – whose sartorial accolades by now include putting the style back into the city pinstripe, employing underwear as outerwear, and making tattoos and body piercings acceptable – continues to challenge the establishment’s concept of good taste.
In January, he was invited into the hallowed world of haute couture for the first time and promptly sent out not only couture for women but also for men. “I am all for equality and gender, hahahaha! So I think if women ‘ave it, why don’t men. Poor things.” In April, quietly, and only weeks before Naomi Campbell not-so-quietly made headlines accusing the fashion industry of racism, Gaultier’s ready-to-wear show featured entirely black models – in protest, it emerged, against France’s tightening of immigration laws.
Gaultier was raised in Paris. Both his parents were accountants. Inspiration came, he says, from his grandmother, “a nurse and healer”. It is by now the stuff of fashion legend that Gaultier made his first ever cone bra for his teddy bear and that it was a grim teacher who took exception to him sketching chorus girls from the Folies Bergres (who sealed his fate as a designer).
“She pinned the drawing to my back, you know, to shame me. And, you know, I was not playing very well at football, so I was a little rejected by the others, but when I showed them they liked it. So I realised that, by sketching, people might like me.”
It would be all too easy to dismiss Gaultier as a loveable loon and despite the fact that he’s in his mid-40s, in every piece written about him he is still described as the enfant terrible of French fashion. It is admittedly a myth he himself perpetuates. He is an intensely private person who has lived alone in Paris since the death of Francis Menuge, his partner of 15 years, from Aids at the end of the Eighties.
To ignore Gaultier’s more serious side, though, would be to underestimate his impact as one of the most subversive influences in 20th-century fashion.
“I am doing what I love,” he tells me. “It’s what I dreamt of doing ever since I was a child. I wish for everyone to be able to do that. What I do, I can do it with `art’.” Then he says it again, more slowly, trying to pronounce that elusive “h”, though still not quite managing it.