Jean Paul Gaultier at the Brooklyn Museum — Photos 4
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 4 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.
Stage Costumes and the Cinema
No designer of Gaultier's generation lived more fully on stage and screen. He dressed Madonna for the Blond Ambition tour — the cone bra is the single most reproduced costume of its decade — created wardrobes for films including The Fifth Element, and put singers, dancers and actors into clothes that became part of their performances. The Brooklyn exhibition gave that work its own place, with stage costumes and film excerpts among the galleries this page's photographs record.
The stage work was never a sideline. A costume must read at fifty metres, survive a dancer's movement and photograph from every seat in the house; the discipline shows in the couture, whose silhouettes are built to be read the same way. In the museum the costumes stood among the runway clothes without a change of register — the exhibition's point, made quietly.
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
What is Jean Paul Gaultier's most famous stage costume?
The cone bra corset he designed for Madonna's 1990 Blond Ambition tour — the defining image of both the tour and the designer's public reputation.
Did the exhibition include film material?
Yes: excerpts from films were shown alongside stage costumes and documentation of concerts and dance performances, as part of the exhibition's seven themes tracing Gaultier's influences from the streets of Paris to the cinema.
Was Gaultier still designing when the exhibition ran?
Yes — the Brooklyn run (October 2013–February 2014) came while he still showed ready-to-wear; he retired from ready-to-wear later in 2014 and from couture in 2020.