An internationally renowned French fashion designer, iconoclastic couturier, and lifelong cinephile, Jean Paul Gaultier draws endless inspiration from film’s transformative masculine and feminine archetypes and their transgressions. Curated under his artistic direction, the exhibition CinéMode par Jean Paul Gaultier proposes a crossed history of cinema and fashion, provoking a sacred journey from the silver screen to the raucous runway. Referencing Marlene Dietrich’s gender-fluid androgyne, Brigitte Bardot’s rebellious bombshell, Catherine Deneuve’s timeless chic, Donyale Luna’s metallic armors, and Gaultier’s own thrilling collaborations with director Pedro Almodóvar, costumes and haute couture show themselves in this exhibition of cinematic glamor.

CinéMode par Jean Paul Gaultier is guest-curated by Jean Paul Gaultier with Matthieu Orléan and Florence Tissot. It is co-organized by La Cinémathèque française and the Caixa Fondation.

About the designer

Jean Paul Gaultier (b. 1952, Arcueil, France) began his career with Pierre Cardin in 1970 at age 18. After tenures at Esterel, Patou, and again with Cardin, Gaultier founded his own fashion house and staged his first show in Paris in 1976. Critical and commercial success quickly followed, and by the early 1980s he had become one of the hottest young designers. From the very beginning, Gaultier sought to express the multifaceted nature of beauty that could be found in the least expected places, a philosophy embodied in the lowly tin can, a recurrent symbol that gained the designer notoriety as the packaging for his hugely successful perfume. Gaultier launched his menswear line in 1984 with the collection “Male Object,” and in 1997 he realized his dream of designing haute couture with the collection “Gaultier Paris.” From 2004 to 2011, Gaultier designed the Hermès line of womenswear. In 2015, he made the decision to solely pursue haute couture.

Throughout his design career, Gaultier has embraced dance, music, and film. His costumes for Madonna’s Blond Ambition tour left an indelible imprint on popular culture, while his instantly iconic cinematic collaborations include The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) with Peter Greenaway; The City of Lost Children (1995) with Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet; The Fifth Element (1997) with Luc Besson; and Kika (1993), Bad Education (2004), and The Skin I Live In (2011) with Pedro Almodóvar. At the Folies Bergère in Paris in 2018, Gaultier presented Fashion Freak Show, a theatrical revue of his life story and 50-year influence through song, dance, and fashion. After a triumphant nine-month run, the show commenced an international tour. In 2020 at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Gaultier presented his final haute couture collection with a major runway show featuring famous models, VIPs, and friends of the house and performances by artists including Catherine Ringer and Boy George. The House of Gaultier continues his legacy, selecting a new guest designer each season to reinterpret the codes of his extraordinary creations.