tatler.com Tatler August 2019She knows what she wants. She always tries to
push the boundaries.’
That’s just as true of himself. If Gaultier is,
today, dressed down in the all-black uniform
that fashion types so often wear (a watch made
from several straps of leather give the only frisson
of light bondage), his creations have always
been delightfully subversive, alternately sexy
and serious and silly. It’s been like this since he
was a child, when he fell in love twice, watching
television. The first time, catching a show by
the infamous Folies Bergères, is what made him
dream of staging his own extravaganzas – a
dream which really did come full circle when he
staged Fashion Freak Show first in Paris, at the
very same Folies. The second time, seeing the
classic French film Falbalas, a luxurious drama
set in a fashion house, made him zero in on
fashion – and start styling his teddy bear, Nana,
accordingly. ‘I said, “Oh, it’s fashion I need to
do,’’’ he recalls. ‘But fashion as a show, a spectacle.
That’s what fascinated me.’
In person, Gaultier still presents that sense
of wide-eyed wonder. ‘I have something child-
ish in myself,’ he admits. ‘Even if it’s hard
work, I am still playing my games.’ He says he
is ‘shy’, that he’s not confident outside work –
but that when he’s creating, he’s fine. Either
way, he is not, he says – and this is a recurrent
refrain – as uptight as his fellow Frenchmen.
‘Me, it’s always half full,’ he says, picking up
his water glass and pointing at it. ‘Not the
French way. Always negative.’
And it’s surely this relentless desire to seize
the day that helped him climb out of Arcueil,
a poor suburb of Paris, and into fashion’s high-
est echelons. An only child, he was the son of
an accountant (his father) and a clerk (his
mother); there wasn’t much money around.
He often cites his maternal grandmother,
Marie Garage, a stylish lady who was also a
clairvoyant, as an inspiration, though he only
realised that in retrospect. ‘I never think exactly
why I do what I do. I did it, you know?’ ‘Did
it’ included sending the fashion sketches he’d
been making since he was a child to famous
designers. Impressed, Pierre Cardin hired
Gaultier when he was 18. At 24, he went it
alone. And almost ever since he’s been regarded
as French fashion’s enfant terrible, even when
he was clearly a member of the establishment- he was Creative Director of Hermès between
2003 and 2010.
One place he has been markedly terrible is
London. When Gaultier first visited here in
the Seventies, his head was turned by the
punks and the ska kids, the skinheads and
the teddy boys. ‘The tribes you had. They
fascinated me. And the girls who were round
like that’ – he gestures to a small belly –
‘and they had the make-up, and the ]
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