Jean Paul Gaultier

Jean Paul Gaultier never went to fashion school, and the liberation that came from that absence shaped everything he made. He taught himself through the museum collections he visited as a teenager, through the cinema he absorbed, and through the contradictions he found irresistible: the masculine and the feminine, the sacred and the profane, the street and the haute couture atelier. The corset worn as outerwear, the mariniere as a luxury object, the cone bra as both critique and celebration: Gaultier’s vocabulary was drawn from fashion’s unconscious and returned to it transformed. He dressed Madonna, shaped the silhouette of the nineties, and proved that wit and rigour were not opposites. Pre-loved Jean Paul Gaultier is among the most collectible propositions in vintage fashion, a designer whose ideas have only sharpened with distance.