ERROR:
subscribe to style file blog via RSSscent of a gaultier woman
June 5, 2008 11:48 am
Though he sent his first gender-bending collection down the runway more than 30 years ago, fashion’s resident enfant terrible, Jean Paul Gaultier, is still the go-to guy for envelope-pushing types. Like his highly recognizable designs, his fragrances have also earned icon status—torso-shaped bottles that house the scent equivalents of Madonna’s cone bra from the Blonde Ambition tour or Marion Cotillard’s mermaid-inspired couture dress from the 2008 Academy Awards. In anticipation of the release of his newest perfume, Ma Dame, and its international ad campaign starring Agyness Deyn, Style.com caught up with the designer at his maison de couture to talk about feminism, fragrance sacrilege, and his kind of woman.
In your line of fragrances, where does Ma Dame fit?
I have really built a family of perfumes: Classique is the mother, Le Male is the father, the son is Fleur du Male, Fragile is sort of like the aunt, and now here comes the daughter. She is energetic, modern, and young in attitude, and that concludes the family.
What was the initial idea this time around?
With this one, I needed to figure out how to make it smell electric. I still wanted musk, because I know musk is sensual. And sensuality is important because perfume is like a dress: You can be totally nude, but you are dressed by your perfume. [Fragrance] is very complimentary to fashion in this way—it’s another story about color and packaging and often gives me ideas for my clothes. I did one dress in my couture collection in the pink from this perfume.
Is this emphasis on electricity and energy what led you to the unorthodox packaging approach you took with the box, insofar as you literally have to rip it open in order to remove the bottle?
I have always been influenced by movements—they are very important; they show who we are and how we feel and what we need. You have different ways to open things, and this is a quite punk-y way to do it, and for fragrance, that’s like sacrilege! It’s an attitude that says, “I do what I want.”
How would you say this idea of independence is reflected in your deliberate spelling of the fragrance’s name, which could suggest a certain possessiveness rather than a freedom?
The word “madame” is very bourgeois and old-fashioned. But “Ma Dame” is completely different. It’s my type of woman—at the same time fragile and strong, like a tomboy that is a little androgynous in attitude so, you know, she can cut her hair if she wants. It’s a cliché that women have to have long hair to seduce a man. But [cutting your hair] means something—an independence, that women don’t always have to seduce a man. They can seduce a woman, if they want.
And is this character composite what led you to Agyness Deyn—in all of her short-, spiky-haired glory—as the face of the fragrance?
I met [Deyn] in 2006, the year I was celebrating the 30th anniversary of my company. I did a retrospective and she wore the first outfit at the show, which was also the first look I did that was really different from what everyone else was doing in 1976: It was a biker jacket like Marlon Brando but with a French flag on the back and studs; a long tutu but with pockets in the back, like a jeans tutu; and tennis shoes. She was ballerina and biker, so feminine and masculine. It was a mix of my sensibility, and I knew she was completely the one to represent it.
You’ve been somewhat of a champion of women in this way, bucking convention with your clothes and, it would appear, with your fragrances as well. Where does this sentiment come from?
I’ve always found a power and intelligence in women and thought it was a kind of injustice that there were things that they couldn’t do when I was first starting in fashion—like women who were more clever than men weren’t paid as well as men. As they became more liberated, I tried to reflect this same balance through my clothes, so I did [some looks] for two in my first collection, where men could wear skirts and women could wear trousers. Then, after the seventies, when some girls wanted to start wearing bras again—not because they were obliged but because they wanted to play, to seduce—I was doing a lot of corsets.
tags:
