Jean Paul Gaultier Dedicated His Couture Show to the “Queen of Paris Punk”
A runway look from Jean Paul Gaultier’s Spring/Summer 2016 collection. Photo: Getty Images
When Jean Paul Gaultier learned of the death of his first muse, Edwige Belmore, back in September during preparations for his Spring/Summer Couture 2016 collection, he immediately changed course setting out to pay ode to the iconic “Queen of Paris Punk” and Le Palace (the Paris version of Studio 54) their stomping ground in the late Seventies. Belmore, whose signature look was a shaved head, leather jacket and riding pants, even worked as the club’s physiognomist. “I was 20 years old, in my little tuxedo, bleach blond crew cut, big red lips, six body guards, and I was the person who decides who comes in and who doesn’t.”
Gaultier for his Paris show on Wednesday pulled out all the stops to recreate the club’s energy. Cigarette-puffing models styled to evoke Belmore and her Palace posse including Farida Khelfa, Amanda Lear, and Eva Ionesco (all three seated front row) emerged through a replica of the club’s entrance at the catwalk’s mouth like they’d just walked off the dance floor into the street. Silhouettes mixing glitter-glam and androgyny ticked off all the house signatures from pinstripe tailoring and innerwear worn as outerwear to corset belts and biker jackets while beauty attitudes moved between Guy Bourdin glam and Ziggy Stardust, with revisited mullets.
Gaultier onstage with his models. Photo: Getty Images
Debonair silk pajamas was a key look, for the kind of woman who likes to roll out of her lover’s bed into the club, with one killer outing - black fishnets and a white marabou-feather tuxedo jacket striped with black crystals - evoking the look Belmore wore the first time she walked in one of Gaultier’s shows. The couturier has always been about elevating street codes, also sending out crystal-embroidered satin bombers and silk jacquard pants masquerading as bleached denim. While Gaultier recently wound down his ready-to-wear business to focus on couture, the wearability factor of his creations lives on.
"Pink glitter, pink glitter all the way!” yelled fellow front-rowee Beth Ditto post show, adding she’d have killed to live the Palace era firsthand. “It was like before everything was bad, you know, nobody knew yet,” she sighed adding, “I wish my new album was more post-punk! I have so many favorite bands from that era: Delta 5, The Slits, Television, I could go on and on.”
Beth Ditto at the Gaultier show. Photo: Getty Images
Posing for a shot with Gaultier and Fergie, who looked fierce in an asymmetric double-breasted black pantsuit with mesh glove, Lear, who was an exotic figure on the nightclub circuit, and a gossip-column fixture linked with many of the era’s rock stars, was feeling nostalgic for an era when everything was unpolitically correct. “I was very touched he played some of my music - Blood and Honey and Fashion Pack. And those little Camembert box hats, we actually wore them! Everyone was there - Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, it was such a free time…”
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