Jean-Paul Gaultier

Couturier

Gaultier designed the wardrobe of many motion pictures, including Luc Besson's The Fifth Element, Pedro Almodóvar's Kika, Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's La Cité des enfants perdus (The City of Lost Children). He currently designs for three collections: his own couture and ready-to-wear lines, for both men and women.

In 1988 Gaultier released a dance single titled "How To Do That" on Fontana records from which came one of the first ever "single title" remix albums "Aow Tou Dou Zat" on Mercury records. The album includes mixes by Norman Cook, JJ Jeczalik, George Shilling, Mark Saunders, Latin Rascals, David Dorrell, Tim Atkins, Carl Atkins, and Mantronik. Co-written & produced by Tony Mansfield, video directed by Jean Baptiste Mondino. The album also featured a collaboration with accordion player Yvette Horner.

Gaultier has designed a number of the costumes and outfits worn by rocker Marilyn Manson, including the outfits for Manson's Golden Age of Grotesque album. In France the costumes he designed for singer Mylène Farmer gained much attention. In spring 2008 he signed a contract to be again the fashion designer for her tour in 2009.

In 2008, he designed the white and silver mermaid dress that Marion Cotillard wore at the 80th Academy Awards, when she won the Oscar for her performance in La Vie en Rose.

He is also well known for sponsoring the 2003–04 exhibit in the Costume Institute of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled "Braveheart: Men in Skirts," which showed designs by Dries van Noten, Vivienne Westwood, and Rudi Gernreich in addition to Gaultier's in order to "examine[] designers and individuals who have appropriated the skirt as a means of injecting novelty into male fashion, as a means of transgressing moral and social codes, and as a means of redefining an ideal masculinity."

In 2011, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with the Maison Jean Paul Gaultier organized a retrospective exhibit, “The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk." That exhibit is on tour with venues at the Swedish Center for Architecture and Design (Arkitekturmuseet) in Stockholm, the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York City, the Barbican Center in London and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.

He has designed the costumes for Kylie Minogue's international KYLIEX2008 tour, as well as the late iconic Hong Kong singer Leslie Cheung, who hired Gaultier to design eight different costumes for the last concert tour before Cheung's death.

In 2012, he was named as a member of the Jury for the Main Competition at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This is the first time a fashion designer was called to sit on a jury at the festival. He also designed the dress that Anggun wore as she represented France during the grand-finals of the Eurovision Song Contest 2012 held in Baku, Azerbaijan. In 2012 he also participated in the Cali ExpoShow in Cali (Colombia), showing his extense collection of perfumes and all classic clothes.