Jean Paul Gaultier’s Fashion Freak Show at the Folies Bergere

Jean Paul Gaultier’s Fashion Freak Show at the Folies Bergeres

As an impressionable little boy, Jean Paul Gaultier watched a flickering black-and-white television transmission of a show from Paris’s legendary music hall, the Folies Bergère. The production’s scantily clad lovelies in their glittering if vestigial costumes and towering feathered headdresses cast a spell: from then on it was his dream to be a part of this magical world of rhinestones and razzmatazz.

Gaultier had already proved that he was no ordinary little boy: he spent his school lessons sketching fanciful showgirl costumes and was so transfixed by his beloved grandmother’s elaborate corsetry that he constructed a conical bra for his teddy-bear, Nana: his first fashion creation.

Nana makes a cameo appearance in the opening number of Fashion Freak Show, the realization of Gaultier’s childhood dream that sets his life to Hi NRG music—arranged by the legendary Nile Rogers—and dance, choreographed by Marion Motin, in a whimsical production at those fabled Folies. Founded in 1869 in the last gasp of the decadent Second Empire, the theater was subsequently made over in a high style Art Deco setting conceived by the artist Maurice Pico in 1926 that provides the perfect foil to Gaultier’s brilliantly inventive costuming. This being the Folies Bergère, Nana’s fur is rendered in fluffy biscuit maribou, that crude cardboard brassiere transformed into a cantilevered construction of soft pink satin that recalls the amazing stage costumes Gaultier created for Madonna’s 1990 Blonde Ambition Tour.

There are numbers that evoke Gaultier’s inspirations—from Jacques Becker’s fabulous 1945 movie Falbalas, set in a Parisian haute couture house and costumed by Marcel Rochas, to The Rocky Horror Show, with its frank treatment of sexuality and proto-punk ethos that he discovered on a seminal trip to London in the 1970s. The production is co-directed by Gaultier’s friend Tonie Marshall, whose beautiful mother Micheline Presle was the ingénue star of Falbalas. Other scenes celebrate Gaultier’s fashion adventures, including a fun number that evokes the chaos of his first fashion shows when he married French high style with an iconoclastic London punk spirit to create clothes out of repurposed tutus, motorcycle jackets, army camouflage and trash bags. “The runway has been my stage for years,” says Gaultier, who has featured Madonna as well as Beth Ditto, and Conchita Wurst in his spectacular fashion show experiences. “I probably wouldn’t have gone into fashion if there weren’t any catwalk shows,” he added.

Gaultier trained with the futurist Pierre Cardin and subsequently at the conservative House of Jean Patou. From the very beginning of his solo career in 1976, his runway shows have been notable for their celebration of diversity in size, age and ethnicity, reflecting Paris’s rich cultural mix and the worlds of Le Palace and the city’s other great nightclubs that were the designer’s youthful playgrounds. “The femme fleur stereotype is not for me,” Gaultier has said, “I prefer thistles.” The cast of the Freak Show reflects this spirit of joyous individuality.

A series of videos that are a key part of the production feature guest stars including some of Gaultier’s long-term iconic clients and friends. Rossy de Palma plays the infant Gaultier’s unforgiving school teacher, who harbors secret fashion fantasies of her own. Catherine Deneuve reads out the hysterical names that Gaultier gave the creations in his fabulous men’s couture show of the early ’90s, with its cast of strapping he-men wearing bustled ballgowns and off-the-shoulder bodices.

The Australian dancer and Voguer Patrick Kuo portrays the young Gaultier, and Gregoire Malandain is his great love Francis Menuge, in a charming scene where they dance as one in one in a signature Gaultier navy and white matelot sweater big enough to embrace the two of them. The mood of the production shifts to reflect the tragedy of Menuge’s premature death when he succumbed to AIDs in 1990.

Fashionistas will thrill to the appearance of the runway star Anna Cleveland, daughter of the fabled Pat—who ignited fashion shows in the ’70s and ’80s with her balletic twirls and sinuous movements—who is, for my money, the production’s break out star. Cleveland fille strikes Erte-esque attitudes and channels Josephine Baker—who was the sensation of Paris when she danced on this very stage in the revue La Folie du Jour in 1926 wearing a girdle of bedazzled satin bananas and little else. Gaultier saw the superb Baker’s final show at the Bobino, a week before she died, and it remains one of his most cherished memories. Cleveland is joined onstage by the staggeringly limber Cuban-born heartthrob Lazaro Cuerno Costa, one of the talented, hard working and quick-changing ensemble who shift in an out of different roles with chameleon ease.

The production’s uplifting message to be true to yourself and to realize your dreams—as Gaultier himself has done—is set to a series of anthemic pop classics that had the audience at the preview dress rehearsal that I saw dancing in the aisles. “I hope you will enjoy this show as much as I enjoyed creating it,” says Gaultier. I certainly did.

Jean Paul Gaultier’s Fashion Freak Show at the Folies Bergeres

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