“It’s Couture, But It’s Also Reality”—A Conversation Between Jean Paul Gaultier and His New Guest Designer Julien Dossena

JD: For me, there’s this idea of kinds of clothes, allures, and attitudes that are potentially part of a dress code, but what happens is that they are transformed. The question is how to take an element and, with all the good intentions in the world, draw attention to it and say “look how beautiful this is.”

JPG: That said, I’m not sure you could do something like that today.

JD: I’ve always considered that when you transform something and keep just a line, or an element, it’s a rather virtuous exercise. If you take a Hawaiian raffia skirt and put it with a lei, that brings nothing new to fashion. But if a designer’s work is really well done, a mix of genres and codes creates a new entity, and a new identity. If you approach that with

respect, it’s super interesting. I think it’s important to continue exploring codes and reapplying them in a way that creates something new. You have to have confidence in your own respect and the work you put into it, and that’s how I see the rabbi collection, for example.

Is there an element of nostalgia at work here?

JD: Not for me, because the clothes [in the archive] are so alive. For me personally, nostalgia is about an emotion that’s aroused by seeing something again. For me, it’s more about discovering, for example, a dress in this kind of draped, crushed silk velvet that used to be used for hats, but it’s not being produced anymore, which is when you say “wow—there she is.” Those moments are somewhat sacred, but it’s not about nostalgia.

Did you work with muses in mind?

JD: It was more about expressing a community. [To JPG] To me, it’s the people around you who really inspire you, so I keep that in mind without really thinking about anyone in particular.

JPG: That’s exactly it. The people who inspired me caught my attention for the way they were through their clothes. It’s sociology, in the end.

JD: Fantasist sociology.

JPG: There’s always the notion of pleasure and amusement. You can talk about clothes—that’s how we express ourselves as designers—and really say something.

JD: The idea of pleasure is important, because in your work no one had expressed ideas of provocation and irony in that way before. There’s something innocent and generous about that.