Jean Paul Gaultier Menswear

This ensemble has a kind of schoolboy uniform appearance with its shorts and matching jacket. No wonder it is from the hand of the designer with the nickname L’Enfant Terrible of the fashion world: Jean Paul Gaultier. His creations are always controversial but elegant and playful, and he keeps building unexpected effects in his collections.

Gaultier does that by challenging the ideas of gender, ethnicity, sexual bias and beauty. What is typical feminine or masculine? What is ethnicity? And why? In his search to answer these questions he took the ideas in the extreme like Madonna’s iconic cone bra, or in reverse, like the man-skirt. His iconic style signature of the blue-and-white-striped shirt is also a result of his search. It is based on the duality of the shirt of a sailor; a masculine symbol of the seemingly hetero navy, adapted by the gay culture. This signature can you also see in this ensemble in front of you where the horizontal stripes of blue and white are turned vertical.

Another aspect of Gaultiers work is that he tries to play with fashion history. He respects the style tradition of clothing, but tries to find new elements. The jacket The shorts with legging in front of you may remind you of the ones that men wore from the 15th till begin 19th century we saw at the beginning of this very tour. With this ensemble of Jean Paul Gaultier we sort of completed the fashion circle, spinning us into the future.