Jean Paul Gaultier, Fashion’s OG Enfant Terrible, Talks Controversy, Criticism, and His Successor Duran Lantink

You seemed quite affected by the show—quite emotional.

Yes, it’s true, I was quite sensitive to what he proposed. Because it gave me an injection of my own beginning, when I started. That energy I had, the way of seeing the clothes. I think it’s funny, but people today maybe know mostly my couture and do not really understand how I was this enfant terrible at the beginning. And for those people who were saying after Duran’s show, “This is not Gaultier”: big mistake! At the end I felt very emotional but also happy at the same time because he was like a rebirth in some way, you know. I was feeling my old energy.

That’s a good feeling!

Yeah!

The negative criticism seemed divided between those you mention who were offended that it did not chime with what they think of as Gaultier, and those who were offended much more broadly by the collection, which they found too much and too transgressive to handle.

Yes, but you know, at the beginning I was very transgressive, and people were rejecting what I was doing too. I remember at my real beginning—my first show—nobody came. And at my second show some of the British press came, and the Japanese press came too, and some even gave it quite a good review. But there were no French, none at all.

That first show is where you showed your cat-food-can jewelry?

Exactly. The story is that one day I was opening a tin of food for the cat. It was the type that you had to twist with a key to open, and it was quite a big tin. And I looked at it and I said, oh that’s nice, it looks like a bracelet. And do you know the tea balls that you use to make tea? I used these to make earrings and things like that. So all my collection was high technology! And you know the automatic ashtrays? I used them as a bag or a belt. Maybe it was not very practical, but it was an idea.

This was at the very beginning, right?

Yes. I had no money, I had nothing, so I used what I could find—even garbage. You know, I made a dress with garbage bags. I was using old denim to make a dress, so in a way I was already recycling, and I used objects as jewelry.