Today is July 28th, my partner and I’s anniversary, and the day I fell in love with Jean Paul Gaultier. If you follow Most Wanted, that name will be more than familiar to you after the past few weeks of sharing. I thought today would be the perfect time to reflect on our Love & Gaultier collection and dig into the inspiration behind it.
Why Gaultier? Well, we have a ‘chicken or the egg’ situation on our hands here. When it comes to my uncontrollable need to produce this collection, what came first?: The love of Gaultier, or the plethora of Gaultier pieces in store? Did one manifest the other? Most have assumed I’ve dedicated so much time, creativity, Instagram feed space and rack real estate to one brand because I simply had a large collection of it. These people are partially right. When in resale, you have to source creativity from the clothing that comes across your desk, so in a way I started this affair with Jean Paul when the number of items in store crossed over into ‘collection’ territory. But there’s more to it than that. This wasn’t the first time Gaultier pieces had come in. Some of these pieces have been hiding in the background behind clothing with flashier household names for some time here at Most Wanted. I liked Gaultier, but didn’t yet see the importance of what I was sitting on. It wasn’t until late July, 2022, when my true love affair began. Or, I suppose, my true love affairs began.
If you watched our teaser reel for this collection, you’ll understand why I’ve connected Gaultier to a theme of Love. Last summer our resident JPG client brought in a dress that made my heart flutter. At risk of sounding overly dramatic, it wasn’t a Gaultier dress, it was the Gaultier dress I’d been waiting for whether I knew it or not: A slinky, abstract and floral patterned, 3/4 sleeve jersey dress with a wide neckline and drawstring running up the length of the back that when pulled creates a perfect ruching effect around the bum. The cut was subtly sexy and the pattern screamed Gaultier in a way that assured me this dress would be a turning point in my understanding of the brand and my personal style. I tried it on, tapped that little pink app we can’t get enough of, and posted a video of myself in the mirror at Most Wanted, posing and admiring the piece. The next day, July 28th, I received a message from a fellow fashion lover who I had crossed paths with in NYC back in April of 2022, but had never officially met, agreeing that this dress was indeed beautiful. This was not the invasive, gross DMs one would expect to receive as a young woman posting a video of herself in a tight cut dress. This message was from one fashion person to another, and it was the beginning of a true, sincere, epic love story, both with the man who sent the message and is now my partner, and with Jean Paul Gaultier. This dress jumpstarted the next chapter of my life, sparked my personal love story, and indoctrinated me into the cult of Gaultier.
Jean Paul Gaultier released his first collection in 1976 and has since become a fashion messiah and beacon of in-bad-taste high fashion. From the stuffy bowels of Paris, traditionally rooted in all things couture, rose a designer now known as the ‘Enfant Terrible’ of French fashion. He is the shocking, candid, and unpredictable problem child of the industry, and the fashion world worships him for it. Gaultier always cast his shows with a strong conviction that uniqueness and queerness were not only beautiful but perfectly aligned with his designs and ethos. He once stated that “the facially disfigured should not refrain from applying” to model in his shows, and he has continually cast plus size models, trans models, and models of colour who would be traditionally excluded from couture fashion. Since his start, Gaultier has risen to cult status by doing the unexpected, whether it’s with his iconic sheer tattoo tops and naked body mirage dresses, to his controversial Chic Rabbis runway show in fall 1993. He’s explored aesthetics inspired by bondage and burlesque, and blessed the world with the cult favourite gay sailor aesthetic with his iconic Soleil line. Alongside his fashion counterparts Vivienne Westwood and Manfred ’Thierry’ Mugler, he completely reimagined everyone’s current obsession: the corset. Where Westwood redefined, and Mugler sculpted, Gaultier twisted the idea of a corset and applied it to every possible garment. You’ll see two perfect examples of this in our Gaultier Collection with the yellow pencil skirt and the brown linen corset blazer, recently worn by Emma Chamberlain in baby pink to the Jean Paul Gaultier show in Paris earlier this month.
The worlds of fashion, celebrity and beyond, are obsessed with Gaultier, and it took my own growing obsession to fully take note of it. If you Google Gaultier you’ll see everyone from Rhianna, Cardi B, and Doja Cat to the entire Kardashian-Jenner clan wearing archival, new, and reissue JPG pieces, most commonly dotted designs from the iconic Fall 1995 ‘Cyber’ collection. Kendal Jenner is a known vintage Gaultier collector (recently seen rocking a long sleeve with the same sheer butterfly print as this tank from our collection) and Kylie recently wore a custom bold red, long trained, Gaultier gown to the 2023 Met Gala tributing Karl Lagerfeld. The brand has done modern collaborations with the likes of Y-Project and Lil Nas X and have more recently invited a line up of guest designers to come and reimagine the brand each season, possibly most notably, Olivier Rousteing of Balmain. Perhaps my favourite blend of Gaultier and pop culture happened recently on the runway of Drag Race France. Episode one and the category is: Liberté, Egalité, Jean Paul Gaultier! Many queens rocked their interpretation of Gaultier's iconic cone bra, originally seen in the FW 1984 Barbès collection and later made famous by Madonna on her Blonde Ambition tour in 1990. Of course there was plenty of corsetry to ogle, though my favourite look had to be a reinterpretation of the butterfly dress worn by Dita Von Teese in Gaultier’s 2014 couture show.
Gaultier was once described as “the first and last pop designer” and his following is broad and extremely dedicated. Once on a trip to Paris back in 2019, my friend and I stayed in an AirBNB bedroom in the home of a wonderfully welcoming French family. We befriended our hosts, a couple with two children, a love of jazz and an intricately decorated home in the 15th arrondissement that always smelled of coffee. Turns out, our hosts were avid Gaultier fans, and owned a chair that once belonged to the man himself, purchased at an auction put on by the designer. It was an incredibly campy blue floral print upholstered chair with ruffles crawling up one side. This chair was the family’s prized possession. It was not to be sat on, only admired. This was perhaps my first introduction to the world of Gaultier. But it wasn’t until 2022 that the brand and the designer took root in my life.
Ever since my first trip to New York City, Gaultier had been on my mind, along with a few select others like Vivienne Westwood and Roberto Cavalli. Why these specific brands? For this I have to blame (or more reasonably, thank) James Veloria, the cult vintage and second hand shop based in Manhattan, and the brainchild of Collin James and Brandon Veloria. This store has triggered a micro Mandela effect for me. I’m certain I visited their shop that first spring in the city, but looking back I know the facts state I never set foot in their difficult-to-find Chinatown boutique until my second trip to NYC in October. I had heard about the shop through the vintage grapevine during my first trip and started following them on Instagram. I hadn’t seen the shop in person, but I immediately felt welcomed into the JV club. This is a testament to how brilliantly they bring their followers into the deliberately colourful, off-beat, fashion world they have created. I followed them closely, and these brands which they so often have in store and on their IG story sales, became embedded in my mind. It was like seeing red cars, all of a sudden they were everywhere, especially in vintage and especially Jean Paul Gaultier.
With my head pretty firmly in the world of vintage and second hand, I don’t always have a strong grip on what’s happening in the “new” fashion world. Vintage is objectively more fun, right? In doing so much research about Gaultier I’ve drawn some connections between the designer’s work and current vintage scene. Though Gaultier has been sacred to many since the very start, it seems like he spent the 80s-early 00s inadvertently designing for us vintage folks right now in 2023. The new collections are as thrilling as ever, but there’s something uniquely special about the hunt that comes along with buying vintage JPG that seems to have banded together vintage lovers with a taste for camp. When it came to producing the imagery for the Love and Gaultier collection, I was deeply inspired by resellers bringing vintage Gaultier to the world in so many varying aesthetics, and the online community of Gaultier lovers such as IG accounts like @gaultier_forever and @lordwarg. In collaboration with my friend and incredible photographer Kylie Mae, makeup artists Michaela and Ben Veselic, the location team at Sopa Fine Arts, and our team of models, we created something we felt portrayed the electric combination of colour, texture, art, beauty and fashion that comes to mind when we think of Gaultier. In the styling I wanted thought provoking contrast in patterns and silhouettes, in the editing we were inspired by distorted visuals and cut & paste imagery, and above all everything had to be seeping with sensuality, lust, and of course, love. Love of one another, love of one's self, love of the camera, and love of Jean Paul Gaultier.
The past year has been transformative, for me personally and for Most Wanted, with Gaultier styling so many moments I’ll never forget. I hope you love this collection as much as I do and have fallen in love with Gaultier as much as I have. Keep your eyes peeled because there is always more Gaultier on the horizon here at Most Wanted.