GAULTIER
Jean

• 1. Early life
• 2. Fashion career

Jean Paul Gaultier is a French haute couture and prêt-à-porter fashion designer. He is described as an "enfant terrible" of the fashion industry and is known for his unconventional designs with motifs including corsets, marinières, and tin cans. Gaultier founded his self-titled fashion label in 1982, and expanded with a line of fragrances in 1993. He was the creative director for French luxury house Hermès from 2003 to 2010, and retired following his 50th-anniversary haute couture show during Paris Fashion Week in January 2020.

Aside from his work in the fashion industry, Gaultier co-presented the first seven series of the television series Eurotrash with Antoine de Caunes from 1993–1997.

Early life

Gaultier grew up in a suburb of Paris. His mother was a clerk and his father an accountant. It was his maternal grandmother, Marie Garrabe, who introduced him to the world of fashion.

He never received formal training as a designer. Instead, he began to send sketches to famous couture stylists at an early age. Pierre Cardin was impressed by his talent and hired him as an assistant in 1970. Then he worked with Jacques Esterel in 1971 and Jean Patou later that year again worked for Cardin managing the Pierre Cardin boutique in Manila for a year until 1974. Despite Gaultier's youth, Cardin sent him to Manila to manage the local office. Imelda Marcos was one of his clients. He found himself on a "no leave" list and had to pretend to have a family emergency in order to leave. He never returned.

Fashion career

Gaultier's first individual collection was released in 1976. Although most people found his designs decadent at the time, fashion editors, notably Melka Tréanton of Elle, Claude Brouet and Catherine Lardeur of French Marie Claire, were impressed by his creativity and mastery of tailoring, and later launched his career. In 1980, he designed women's dresses out of plastic trash bags. Gaultier founded his eponymous fashion label in 1982. His 1983 collection "Boy Toy" relaunched the marinière for men. His garments were on sale at Bergdorf Goodman in New York as soon as 1984, and already lauded by Dawn Mello and Polly Allen Mellen. The term "Gaultiered" was coined to describe the classic pieces that were reinterpreted by the designer.  During the 1984 Fall London and Paris shows, Jean Paul Gaultier introduced his line of skirts for men (actually kilts), a breakthrough in men's fashion that stirred a bit of controversy. In 1984 he also introduced the iconic women's corset with cone bra. Gaultier has also worked in close collaboration with Wolford Hosiery.

By 1985, his company made $50 million in sales worldwide. In the 1985 movie Desperately Seeking Susan, Madonna wore a skirt with men's suspenders she had bought from Gaultier. Besides his ready-to-wear collection, in 1988 Gaultier expanded his brand to include the label Junior Gaultier, a lower-priced line of products. The Junior Gaultier outfit was selected by Jeff Banks as the Dress of the Year. In 1988, he also recorded the music video How to do that. At the end of the 1980s he invented a new look for the French accordionist Yvette Horner which relaunched her career. In 1990, he designed Madonna's clothes for her Blond Ambition World Tour.

At the end of the 1980s, Gaultier suffered some personal losses, and in 1990 his boyfriend and business partner, Francis Menuge, died of AIDS-related causes. It is also around that time that he decided to tone down his showmanship and started to plan more intimate events.

Gaultier launched a line of fragrances (Classique) in 1993. The Junior Gaultier label was replaced in 1994 with JPG by Gaultier, a unisex collection that followed the designer's idea of fluidity of the sexes. Gaultier Jean's, a similar line consisting mainly of denim and more simply styled garments with a heavy street influence, followed in 1992, which was then replaced with Jean's Paul Gaultier from 2004 to 2008. Junior Gaultier's name was reused in 2009 for the launching of the child's wear, to be completed with a Baby Line in 2011.

In 1998, Jean Paul Gaultier's company generated €12.9 million ($13.2 million) in sales. In 1999, Hermès acquired 35% of Gaultier's label for 150 million francs ($23 million). Jean Paul Gaultier owned 93% of his company prior to this deal. In 2002, Gaultier's label opened its first fully-fledged stand-alone store. Then, from 2003 to 2010, Gaultier was the creative director of Hermès where he succeeded Martin Margiela. Hermès later increased its stake in Jean Paul Gaultier to 45%. By 2008, 40 Jean Paul Gaultier stores opened worldwide.

He sponsored the 2003–04 exhibit in the Costume Institute of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled "Braveheart: Men in Skirts", which showed designs by Dries van Noten, Vivienne Westwood, and Rudi Gernreich in addition to Gaultier's in order to examine "designers and individuals who have appropriated the skirt as a means of injecting novelty into male fashion, as a means of transgressing moral and social codes, and as a means of redefining an ideal masculinity." He also designed some furniture for the French furniture brand Roche Bobois[34] and an Evian bottle in 2008. Gaultier's spring 2009 couture was influenced by the visual style of singer Klaus Nomi, and he used Nomi's recording of "Cold Song" in his runway show.

In 2011, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with the Maison Jean Paul Gaultier organized a retrospective exhibit, "The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk." That exhibit is on tour with venues at the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design (Arkitektur- och designcentrum, ArkDes) in Stockholm, the Brooklyn Museum in New York City, the Barbican Centre in London, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and the Grand Palais in Paris. The exhibition in Paris, which took place from April to August 2015, was the subject of a documentary called Jean Paul Gaultier at the Grand Palais aired exclusively on Eurochannel. In 2012, he participated in the Cali ExpoShow in Cali (Colombia), showing his extensive collection of perfumes and all classic clothes.

Up until 2014, he designed for three collections: his own couture and ready-to-wear lines, for both men and women. At the spring/summer 2015 show he announced that he was closing the ready-to-wear labels to focus on haute couture. In 2016, he designed more than 500 costumes for the revue THE ONE Grand Show at Friedrichstadt-Palast Berlin.

In 2018, he staged a cabaret show that was loosely based on his life called "Fashion Freak Show" which took place at the Folies Bergere theater in Paris. In 2019, Gaultier collaborated with the New York streetwear brand Supreme.

He announced on 17 January 2020 that his next Paris haute couture fashion show would be his last and that he was retiring from the runway.