Last weekend while Rachelle and I were in Montreal we stopped in to the Museum of Fine Arts to see the Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit. I’ve always had a passing interest in fashion, but really don’t know that much about it or Gaultier in particular. He usually wore a French sailor’s top, he did that conical bra number for Madonna and he designed all the clothes for the movie The Fifth Element. That’s it, the sum of my Gaultier knowledge. I’m not sure exactly what it was I was expecting, but probably something flimsy and sexy with a sensational flash of Pop Art, sort of like the concussive jolt of Fashion TV.
Whatever small glimpse of high fashion I’ve been given through films, TV and magazines has really focused on the people wearing the clothes rather than the clothes themselves. I see supermodels, I see sex, I see a genetic elite who would look good in or out of anything. However, viewing the clothes up close and stripped of the celebrity that’s wearing it is an entirely different, and yes, artistic experience. The craftsmanship, detail and imagination that flows into each work is stunning, even breath-taking.
The exhibit opens by asking that we walk up a set of opulently attired stairs, as if rising up into a pretentious club that you’re not quite sure you actually want to visit. You’re greeted by an array of about a dozen mannequins, all clad in Gaultier and many with faces that have been animated through a projection system. This is freaky, like walking into the cast-off room of a mad scientist who never quite perfected in his android. The features on the mannequins move in familiar yet unnatural ways, some startling you by speaking in a way that’s both scary and alluring. It’s entirely dislocating, like stepping into a future never quite imagined.
Mannequins of this nature pop-up throughout the exhibit and I think I actually fell in love with two of them. Dressed in stunningly beautiful clothes, these models seduce you. Speaking in the most fetching French, sometimes whistling or singing, they’re whimsical ideals plucked from dreamland. As if to accentuate this, in one room, behind the most beguiling living mannequin, covering the entire length of the room is a panorama of Paris at night, and it’s just beautiful. Honestly, I could have stood there for hours, falling in love with some imagined version of the perfect Parisian moment.
On an oval-shaped catwalk, about a dozen or so faceless mannequins rotated past, propelled by a conveyor belt. Without the projected animation on the faces of the other models located throughout the show you’re forced to focus on the clothes. As each piece rotates to the centre-point, turning into view as if employing the saucy or insouciant flourish of a flirty model, I imagined the sort of person who might wear such rarified works of wonder. It would be a moment of such intricate cinema, like a Bond villain at a cocktail party, so beautiful as to be impossible, coming down the staircase toward you exhaling smoke, the city of lights just beyond, your life forever changed by bearing witness to such living art.