Jean Paul Gaultier bounds into the Ristorante National in Paris doing something distinctly British: complaining about the weather. “It’s so hot,” he says. “It’s quite humid, I think, it’s not a nice dry heat.” Casual in a denim shirt and camo-print jacket, he joins me at his usual table in a far corner of the trendy Italian restaurant in the Hôtel National des Arts et Métiers. “It’s a long time since you’ve been here,” says a waiter as he takes our drinks order (two “detox” juices, on Gaultier’s recommendation). “I know,” responds the designer with a shrug, “because work, work, work.”
Gaultier, 66, is the original enfant terrible of French fashion, with a 40-year career as provocateur. He made his name subverting the traditional concepts of masculinity and femininity through camp theatrics and outlandish inventions. In the 1980s he dressed men in skirts; a decade later, he designed a pink satin conical bra for Madonna that propelled him to international fame.
“I think at the time that it was quite nice appreciation, ‘l’enfant terrible’,” he says. “It showed that I was doing things that were maybe not in the rules, which is good for me. I wanted to show that women can be strong and feminine at the same time,” he says. “And men are not all like John Wayne. Men can also be seductive, they can also be beautiful and stupid.” (Gaultier’s first men’s collection, in 1984, was called “Man As Object”.) “I saw through clothes that it was a phallocracy. It was the men who had the power. And that shocked me.”