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Jean Paul Gaultier’s Celluloid Couture

Lights, Camera, Gaultier! French fashion’s enfant terrible Jean Paul Gaultier lost it, or rather found it, at the movies this week with a sumptuous haute couture collection inspired throughout by cinema shown in Paris on Wednesday, July 8.

Gaultier telegraphed his punch to guests as soon as they walked in the door of his rue St Martin headquarters; each area of the show space was named after a major studio, like Paramount or Pathe. This fall 2009 show even opened with the Twentieth Century Fox fanfare, causing the six score of photographers to sing along to the drum roll and trumpet fanfare.

Each look was named after a famous movie, opening with curvaceous Dutch beauty Lara Stone as "Contempt," Jean Luc Godard’s classic starring Jack Palance and Brigitte Bardot about the cynicism of filmmaking. Stone strutted out in leather trench-coat and seamed tights, her blonde hair piled up in a beehive just like Bardot in the movie.

Sergei Eisenstein’s "Battleship Potemkin" was represented by beautifully cut Chinese quilt taffeta sailor pants and a cropped reefer coat. "Key Largo" was a vampish femme fatale in military trench meets jumpsuit, technically tricky tailoring and great panache. The French would call them cineaste chic.

At times, the more outlandish looks seemed almost like living organisms, such as the crocodile scale ensemble that represented "Night of the Iguana." And few couturiers can draw out such fine craftsmanship from their ateliers as Gaultier, whose satin Mae West look seemed made out of Wurlitzer organ pipes.

Though the coolest idea was probably the most restrained, a beautifully draped black décolleté dress for Michelangelo Antonioni’s "La Notte," where Russian model Sasha Pivovarova mimicked the blond sexy intellectual hair of star Monica Vitti.

Gaultier took his concept even further with several outfits literally lade of film strips, most spectacularly one called "Rushes."

The whole thing garnered great applause from an audience that included Kylie Minogue and Mickey Rourke.

Asked what a Irish-American actor was doing at a couture show, Rourke replied, “They promised me lots of green beer, kegs of it. See you backstage for a glass!”

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