This was the brilliant erotic fantasy Jean Paul Gaultier conjured for his Fall 2002 couture collection. As excerpts from The Story of O were piped into the ears of his audience through headsets, a sequence of sophisticated British menswear tailoring gave way to a display of Austro-Hungarian fin-de-siècle romanticism. Often the models looked as if they’d been caught in flagrante, coolly making off into the night with a man’s cashmere scarf, a fox-fur stole, a heroic officer’s jacket or a crocheted bedspread wrapped around their naked bodies. In the chicest possible way, of course.

Gaultier is at an age where he has the experience to elaborate a theme, to mine it for its riches, colors and associations, without losing sight of the fact that he’s designing for a real person living in the here and now. His innate sense of sexy adult sophistication allows him to project simplicity—as in a high-necked black velvet dress with a subtle sprinkling of jet bead, topped with a huge fox hat—as convincingly as haute drama. (His bride wore a huge “hussar jacket” skirt decorated with frogging and fur, and sported an American-Indian white-feathered headdress and 30-foot veil.)

“She has a lot of lovers, a lot of imagination to play with!” joked the designer after the show. In the audience, Catherine Deneuve, the goddess of grown-up French sexuality, smiled her approval.

– Sarah Mower