If you weren’t hanging out in Paris during the white-hot couture and ready-to-wear scene of the 80s and 90s, you can catch up with what you missed in one crazy, blissful technicolor evening at the Jean Paul Gaultier Fashion Freak Show playing at the mythic Folies Bergère music-hall through April 21.
The Folies Bergère (established in 1869 and adorned with its landmark Art Deco façade in 1926) ought to be on every American arts-oriented heritage tour, given that the theater nurtured Trans-Atlantic talent like Chicago-born Loie Fuller (1890s) and Josephine Baker (1920s) whose dance acts (and banana tutus) were too daring for censors and sensibilities back in the homeland.
The lobby, decorated in the “too much is not enough” style, is almost worth the admission price so arrive early enough to take pictures of the gilded goddess statues and giant chandeliers before making your way to the tattered red-velvet seats (last re-upholstered in the Piaf era?) and accustoming yourself to the slightly hazy atmosphere (residue of Maurice Chevalier’s cigars?).
Jean Paul Gaultier has always been the offbeat enfant terrible of French fashion culture, holding some of his early fashion shows in circuses, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that his life and work are presented in a Barnum & Bailey version of Gay Pride in Las Vegas. The show is mostly visual; a certain amount of the narration is in French only but it’s easy to follow if you know the basic storyline.
The saga begins with the designer’s 1950s childhood, his early fashion experiments with a beloved teddy bear, and an homage to the grandmother who let him play with her corsets. We share the joy when Jean Paul meets the love of his life and share the sorrow when his lover dies of AIDS. We travel to the seamy sex clubs of London and the wild parties held in the infamous Palace night-club, the Parisian Studio 54 of the era.
But most of all, it’s about the clothes: Gaultier’s insanely inventive fashion manages to be playful and provocative at the same time. When the models sashay on stage in clothes from his debut show in the late 70s, the entire audience is swaying to the 1978 ear-candy hit “Ça plane pour moi” by Belgian punk artist Plastic Bertrand. (Check out this video if you want to sing along, or this audio if the previous one is blocked in your country.)
On-screen celebrity cameos of Gaultier muses are slipped in between the fashion shows. Some faces will be familiar to non-French visitors (Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Catherine Deneuve) although others (rock divas Catherine Ringer and Mylène Farmer; fashion pundit Cristina Cordula who critiques the cat-walking skill of a chosen member of the audience) will only be recognizable to the hometown crowd. There’s a funny, back-handed slap at fashion dictatorships with actors portraying Anna Wintour and Karl Lagerfeld. (That sequence is in French with sub-titles even though calorie-obsessed pseudo-Karl remarks that speaking French is fattening.)
The show ends with a taped video of Jean Paul Gaultier explaining that fashion is much more than a “commodity” and that everyone is beautiful in his or her own way. It’s a heartwarming happy ending to an upbeat evening.
A word about seating: unless you pop for the best orchestra or front-row loge seats, you won’t see absolutely everything. However, the show takes place on many levels (with video screens and acrobats on high platforms) so you will still enjoy a full two hours of fancy, freaky fashion wherever you’re sitting.
Jean Paul Gaultier Fashion Freak Show at the Folies Bergère through April 21, 2019. 32 Rue Richer, 9th arr. Metro Cadet or Grands Boulevard. Tuesday-Saturday at 8pm as well as Saturday and Sunday at 3pm. Tickets 30-99€.
© 2019, Corinne LaBalme