JEAN PAUL GAULTIER “FROM SIDEWALK TO CATWALK”

Paris and The Grand Palais are marking this year’s spring and summer season with a great show on the excentric enfant terrible and design genius Jean Paul Gaultier. Gaultier has shaped the look of fashion over the last 35 years with his avant-garde creations and cutting-edge designs. “From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk”, the first international exhibition of this celebrated and famed French couturier’s work provides a spectacular overview of his extensive oeuvre.

Initiated and produced by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with the Maison Jean Paul Gaultier-Paris and the Kunsthal Rotterdam, the exhibition brings to life the world of Gaultier and gives a unique opportunity to visitors to have access to haute couture, stage and movie costumes.

But this show is more of a contemporary installation than a retrospective. Over a hundred and forty original creations from the early 1970s to the present day, and from both his haute couture collections and his ready-to-wear lines, can be seen at the Kunsthal. Most of these pieces are being exhibited for the first time in the Netherlands, with exceptional loans from Madonna and Pedro Almodovar to name a few. Fashion show recordings, television programmes, films, videos, sketches and photographs by leading photographers complete the world of Gaultier.

In this multimedia setting, thirty unique mannequins wearing remarkable wigs and headdresses by Odile Gilbert, founder of the Atelier 68 in Paris, come ‘alive’ with interactive faces created by technologically ingenious audiovisual projections, surprising visitors with their lifelike presence.

Poetic and playful, the production, design and staging of this dynamic audiovisual element has been produced by Denis Marleau and Stéphanie Jasmin of UBU/Compagnie de création from Montreal, Canada. A dozen celebrities, including Gaultier himself, have lent their faces -projected on to the mannequins – and often their voices to this project. Jolicoeur International from Canada have designed all the mannequins and the scenography was created by Projectiles from Paris.

FROM SIDEWALK TO CATWALK
JEAN PAUL GAULTIER
01 April – 03 August 2015
GRAND PALAIS, PARIS
www.grandpalais.fr