For Jean Paul Gaultier, asking what came first, his love for fashion or film, is akin to the classic chicken-or-egg debate. As a self-proclaimed “child of the TV” in the late 1960s, he grew up as mesmerized by specials dedicated to haute couture fashion shows as reruns of old movies. “I didn’t want to go out and play—I wanted to watch TV,” the French designer tells Vogue, adding that by 13, his sartorial calling was clear. “When I would watch 1940s movies, I understood what the vision of fashion was talking about, and I wanted to do that. This was also the moment André Courrèges’s graphic and artistic fashions were everywhere. I loved both—the classic and the modern.”
Rather than going to fashion design school, Gaultier considered idiosyncratic filmmakers like William Klein and John Waters his teachers. “Because I learned fashion from looking, I think I was more free,” says Gaultier. “I owe my vocation to the cinema.”
A new exhibition dedicated to Gaultier’s lifelong passion for film is now on view (through September 30) at SCAD Lacoste, the Savannah College of Art and Design’s study-abroad location in Provence, France. Organized by Paris’s Cinémathèque française and the “La Caixa” Foundation, “CinéMode par Jean Paul Gaultier” presents thematic vignettes showcasing films that influenced the couturier’s collections, as well as the costumes he designed for movies, including Kika (1993) and The Fifth Element (1997). It is guest-curated by Gaultier with La Cinémathèque française’s Matthieu Orléan and Florence Tissot.
The exhibition, a distilled version of the original, presented at the Cinémathèque française from October 6, 2021 to January 16, 2022, represents a uniquely full-circle moment. Along with SCAD, the late designer Pierre Cardin was instrumental in renovating and preserving the medieval village of Lacoste, where he was a beloved resident. It was with Cardin that Gaultier began his fashion career in 1970, and the SCAD FASH Lacoste museum, where “CinéMode” is taking place, is, in fact, a former Cardin property.
Here, Gaultier discusses some of the exhibition’s show-stopping highlights, from films that ignited his love of subversive storytelling and spectacle, to his own iconic designs that brought the silver screen to the catwalk.