Jean Paul Gaultier at the Brooklyn Museum — Photos 3
The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk, Brooklyn Museum, 2013–2014.
Photographs of the Jean Paul Gaultier collection at the Brooklyn Museum — page 3 of the photo record taken during The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk (October 25, 2013–February 23, 2014). The exhibition presented approximately 140 haute couture and prêt-à-porter ensembles on custom mannequins, many with interactive faces created by high-definition audiovisual projections.
Use the exhibition navigation on this page to move through the photo set in order — the exhibition introduction page sets out the show's seven themes and its organization by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts — or return to the introduction at any point from the links below the photographs.
Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not this designer's own garments.
The Couture Galleries
The middle galleries of the Brooklyn exhibition belonged to the couture: gowns built over weeks of handwork, feathers, embroidery and tailoring carried to a finish no camera quite resolves. The photographs on this page come from that part of the route, where the enfant terrible label falls away and what remains is a Paris atelier of the first rank, trained in the house tradition and using it at full stretch.
Couture is where Gaultier's challenges to gender and aesthetic codes were argued most seriously — a man's skirt tailored like a Savile Row commission, a gown constructed like a piece of furniture. Standing still on their mannequins, the pieces make the argument without the runway's noise: the codes are not mocked, they are rebuilt.
About This Exhibition
The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk ran at the Brooklyn Museum from October 25, 2013 to February 23, 2014. It was the first international exhibition devoted to the French couturier, organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with Maison Jean Paul Gaultier, Paris, curated by Thierry-Maxime Loriot of the MMFA, with the Brooklyn presentation coordinated by Lisa Small, the museum's Curator of Exhibitions. Approximately 140 haute couture and prêt-à-porter ensembles — from Gaultier's earliest collections to his most recent — were shown on custom mannequins, many with interactive faces created by high-definition audiovisual projections, alongside accessories, sketches, stage costumes, film excerpts, and documentation of runway shows, concerts and dance performances.
Jean Paul Gaultier, born in Arcueil, France, on April 24, 1952, presented his first collection in 1976 and became known as the enfant terrible of Paris fashion: Breton sailor stripes, corsets worn as outerwear, skirts for men, and the cone bra he designed for Madonna's 1990 Blond Ambition tour are his enduring signatures. He was creative director of Hermès from 2003 to 2010, retired from ready-to-wear in 2014, and closed his couture house with a final show in 2020. The remaining photo pages in this set continue the gallery record; the designer's full guide series in this directory — collections, fall and spring fashions, fashion week, news, profiles and runway — is linked in the references.
Photos
Common Questions
Did Jean Paul Gaultier design haute couture?
Yes — Gaultier Paris, his haute couture line, ran from 1997 until his final couture show in 2020, alongside the ready-to-wear; the Brooklyn exhibition drew on both, approximately 140 ensembles in all.
What else was shown besides the clothes?
Accessories, sketches, stage costumes, excerpts from films, and documentation of runway shows, concerts and dance performances, together with photographs by fashion photographers and contemporary artists.
Who curated the Brooklyn exhibition?
The exhibition was curated by Thierry-Maxime Loriot of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, which organized it with Maison Jean Paul Gaultier; Lisa Small coordinated the Brooklyn presentation.