The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier Exhibition

You may know him as the jolly kilted French chap introducing the world’s first dildo museum or the annual naked lawnmower racing championships, but when Jean Paul Gaultier wasn’t being a naughty boy on Channel 4’s soft porn digest Eurotrash, he was designing some of the most important clothes ever to hit the catwalk, and influencing fashion through his work with celebrities such as Madonna – remember her conical bra? From the sublime to the ridiculous, one might say, although not sure which way round that should go…

JP, as we’ll call him for brevity, began his couture career in 1976, quickly gaining a reputation with the press as the enfant terrible of fashion. There always seems to be one, doesn’t there – usually just the most out-there or outspoken designer of the time, and certainly Gaultier earned his rep in those respects. His own fashion house launched in 1997, but his whole career has been harvested for The Fashion World of Jean-Paul Gaultier, an installation exhibition at The Swedish Center for Architecture and Design featuring 120 outfits, sketches and documents from his career, and photographs and video from some of the world’s leading artists. Gaultier’s work is being displayed in a suitably theatrical manner, using animatronic mannequins; the exhibition is running now and ends on 22nd September.