PARIS – Backstage was front-and-centre Saturday at Jean Paul Gaultier’s spring-summer 2012 ready-to-wear show, where the models changed on-set and even the dressers took a lap on the catwalk.
It was a novel approach, but perhaps one that would be better suited to a public of fashion-hungry novices than a roomful of industry insiders for whom backstage holds little mystery or interest. Tack on the fact that the said roomful of fashion editors, stylists and journalists had to wait nearly an hour after the scheduled start time in a room that felt like an oversized oven and you have a recipe for disaster.
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Thankfully, the clothes measured up to the genial French designer’s habitual brilliance and were the saving grace of the plodding, overheated exercise. The theme was tattoos, and Gaultier served up ravishing jackets, bustier dresses and trenchcoats in flesh-tone leather covered with old-school tattoos. Other Gaultier staples, like ultra wide-leg pants in liquid silk jersey and sailor striped tops, filled out the strong collection.
Two tattoo-covered non-models walked in the show, sparking the implausible but still uncomfortable thought that the garments had been made out of their own skin. (They hadn’t, but still.)
Instead of a soundtrack, the show was moderated, in the style of an old-school couture presentation. The moderator – a moderately well-known actress who got her start as a weather girl on French TV – read off the name and a description of each outfit.
To spice up her presentation, she also rattled off trivia about the cast of top models. The problem was that the models were more banal than you’d think by looking at them, and their favourite things – chocolate, lasagna, steak, the colour red – were really pretty uninteresting.
But between the gorgeous clothes, the girls changing on scaffolding at the top of the runway and a photographer shooting them in a makeshift studio on the catwalk, there was plenty to watch – even if the pace could have stood to be ratcheted up a notch or two.
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