I am not a lover of fashion, so when I had to visit the Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts for a French class, I tried to keep an open mind. I told myself that if all cultural education failed, at least the exhibit would be pretty. For $9 and three hours, I felt that I could at least expect “pretty.”
Despite being convinced that JPG had nothing to teach me, I was shocked by everything that I didn’t previously know about the man. In order to broaden your intellectual horizons, I’ve summarized everything I learned in three hours into three short paragraphs.
Jean Paul Gaultier ended gender inequality:
According to one of the signs at the entrance (which I am paraphrasing after translating awkwardly from French to English), Gaultier singlehandedly created a new movement—post-feminism—by creating the cone bra corset. Women may have brought about the first wave of feminism, but we should give credit where it’s due. According to the sign, we should all be thankful to Jean Paul Gaultier for attaching two party hats to a model’s chest. The cone bra corset: erasing gender inequality since JPG thought it up.
Jean Paul Gaultier created environmentalism:
Jean-Paul Gaultier loves the environment so much that he created dresses out of garbage bags for a runway show, and that was the start of environmentalism. He must have had quite a busy career. Gaultier’s use of endangered species as materials—giant tortoise shells as handbags and a cheetah pelt for a dress—gave me the imporession that he believed in resource exploitation, not conservation. We’re still waiting to find out how he’ll stop global warming, but it’ll look fabulous, however he does it.
Jean Paul Gaultier ended racism:
Racism is over. “Le couturier orchestre par le vêtement le dialogue entre les cultures,” reads a sign in the exhibit, roughly translating to, “Jean Paul Gaultier creates intercultural dialogue through clothing.” He also really likes different cultures. He is so open-minded, he even has a special room in his exhibit called “Urban Jungle” to demonstrate his love for other cultures. All of the mannequins, except for one, look like white folk wearing the ‘traditional dress’ of somewhere they are not from.
On a creepy sidenote, all of the mannequins are very realistic and many mannequins in the other rooms have interactive digital faces that speak, but in his cheetah pelt and tortoise shell Urban Jungle, the only mannequin with an interactive face is styled like a bird and makes strangled parrot noises. Who could ever accuse JPG of colonialism or endorsing resource exploitation and the oppression of indigenous people? The man believes in cheetah pelt dresses on silent models—where is his Nobel Peace Prize?
Jean Paul Gaultier, creator of feminism, environmentalism, intercultural dialogue, and the cone bra, has so much to teach each and every one of us. If, however, for any reason you cannot make the exhibit, I recommend that you spend three hours and $9 slowly throwing pennies out of a second floor window to simulate the learning that would have occurred at this exhibit.
