Jean Paul Gaultier’s Fashion World at the Brooklyn Museum

Organized around various rooms focusing on special themes, the exhibit features around 140 haute couture and prêt-à-porter ensembles created between the mid-’70s and 2010 along with sketches, accessories, photographs, stage costumes, and short films emphasizing the couturier’s various partnerships with pop icons, filmmakers, celebrities, and international models who stepped into Gaultier’s world.

While the inaugural room is an impressive kick off for the exhibition praising the navy world and the marinière – directly originating from the French navy jersey tee shirts – we soon discover other themes of punk fashion, provocative stage costumes, double-skin trompe l’oeil pieces, and wedding gowns inspired by Native American and African cultures.

This retrospective shows us how the couturier blurs the boundaries between sexes and cultures. Fascinated by society, identity, and beauty born of difference, it is through his haute-couture masterpieces and aesthetic codes that Gaultier addresses a true message of tolerance and universal love in modern society.

“The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk” is now on view at the Brooklyn Museum until February 23, 2014. For this presentation, Jean-Paul Gaultier partnered with the Montreal-based theater company Ubu Compagnie de Création to offer the face-animated mannequins.