CinéMode by Jean Paul Gaultier at the Cinémathèque française in Paris from October 6, 2021 to January 16, 2022<

A journey through genres and styles, a crossover history of cinema and fashion, where great designers and movie stars rub shoulders for a sumptuous fashion show.

The costumes for the film were made by Marcel Rochas, one of the first designers to have understood that the cinema could serve as a showcase for his creations. Going so far as to guide the main actor in his gestures, he is particularly involved in Falbalas, whose final parade is a compilation of his great successes. Rochas is also often credited as the inventor of the basque in 1945, which Jean Paul Gaultier revisited from his first ready-to-wear collections in the early 1980s. Marked by his grandmother's corsets, the couturier transformed this underwear into a outer garment and made it one of the centerpieces of his label.

From courtesan to Superwoman, from macho to dandy, the feminine and masculine archetypes of the silver screen are constantly evolving, reflecting and sometimes even anticipating the roles of women and men within society.

Hollywood studios invented characters with particularly explosive femininity that Marilyn Monroe magnifies in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Faced with this hyper-sexualized star in sophisticated costumes, the French icon Brigitte Bardot (Et Dieu…créé la femme, 1956) appears as a rebellious heroine brimming with wild sensuality, at the forefront of ready-to-wear fashion. -wear, more youthful and simple. Her contemporaries Delphine Seyrig dressed in Coco Chanel, Jeanne Moreau in Pierre Cardin and Catherine Deneuve in Yves Saint Laurent, symbolize loyalty to French haute couture.

Faced with them, in the line of heroes with conquering virility (such as the cowboy John Wayne), Marlon Brando, dressed in a tank top in A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951), looks like a real erotic break. He is the incarnation of the man-object for Jean Paul Gaultier, who was one of the first couturiers to inject elements of the female wardrobe into the male silhouette. In his James Blondes collection (2011), he thus revisits the British elegance of the character of James Bond, a cult saga in which the powerful Grace Jones is invited, dressed by Azzedine Alaïa, for the time of a film.

As early as the 1930s, Hollywood stars like Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn asserted their androgyny by wearing clothes – trousers, tuxedos – usually reserved for men’s wardrobes. Both in life and in the roles they choose, these pioneers are shaking up the codes to assert the freedom to dress as they want. Minorities in the society of the time which refutes ambiguity, they open a new aesthetic and moral path, already advocating gender equality.

It will take several decades for these transgressions to become less confidential. The 1970s popularized the scandal, with transvestite movie heroes with outrageous sexuality (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 1975). The underground becomes more visible, shelving propriety, as shown by Rainer W. Fassbinder's Quarrel (1982), and its phallic-beautiful sailors. Marked by this subversive homo-eroticism, Jean Paul Gaultier made the sailor top the emblem of L'Homme-Objet, his first men's ready-to-wear fashion show, in 1983. Revisited and bare in the back (characteristic usually associated with the femininity), the marinière would become the symbol of her brand.

This inversion of genres, Gaultier expresses it in his fashion shows, but also in the films for which he is the costume designer, in particular those of Pedro Almodóvar. The two “enfants terribles” share a colorful, sassy and unprejudiced vision of the world. With a predilection for different and queer bodies.

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Recurring in historical films, metal is the prerogative of men and women warriors, whose most famous icon, Joan of Arc, has been in turn interpreted by Jean Seberg, Sandrine Bonnaire or Milla Jovovich.

In 1968, it was Jane Fonda who, in the guise of the adventurer Barbarella, donned a psychedelic metal tunic, specially created by Paco Rabanne. Two years earlier, the designer caused a sensation by presenting on the Parisian catwalks “12 importable dresses” in rhodoïd and steel made with a blowtorch.

The fashion of the 1960s was revolutionary. This is the era of the Space Age, represented by visionary couturiers such as Pierre Cardin and André Courrèges. Acclaimed for their futuristic ready-to-wear collections, they experimented with new shapes or materials while interacting with science, design and cinema: Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) or Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971) accompany this utopian movement. A stirrer of exuberant images in this changing sixties world, the photographer William Klein made his first feature film in 1966, Who are you Polly Maggoo?. A poetic satire of the world of media and couture, the film opens with a scene of a parade of metal dresses, screaming, creaking, delirious.

Twenty years later, William Klein will film Jean Paul Gaultier backstage in his documentary Mode in France. The occasion of a tribute to the couturiers of the 1980s who, emancipated from their elders, succeeded in making fashion a playful and protesting spectacle.

The ultimate celebration of fashion, the catwalk moment is a staple of most movies whose plot is set within haute couture. It's not unusual for the film's narration to be momentarily paused to show a parade in all its glory. One of the most memorable appears in CinemaScope in The Women (George Cukor, 1940), a marvelous pause in color in a film still in black and white.

At first exclusively by appointment, the fashion show takes place in salons with a luxurious atmosphere. The models strike a pose there, sometimes describing their own outfits, before strolling on the catwalks, most often rectilinear. Fiction very quickly took over all its extras: the backstage fittings, the press, the public, especially those placed in the front rows, made up of customers, journalists, photographers and celebrities. From Funny Face (Stanley Donen, 1957) to the Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006) via Absolutely Fabulous (Gabriel Aghion, 2001), editors and wealthy clients humorously embody the power relations of the fashionworld.

In the 1980s, Jean Paul Gaultier, but also Thierry Mugler and Vivienne Westwood made the fashion show a spectacle in its own right. The scenography, the sound orchestration and the attitude of the models – who seem to be interpreting a scenario in a single take – make the parade the culmination of a collective creation similar to that of the cinema.

Sources French Cinematheque