For anyone whose appetite for fashion-as-art wasn’t sated by the much anticipated and much adored Alexander McQueen Savage Beauty exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, start planning a weekend getaway to Dallas: The Dallas Museum of Art will host the first half of the American exhibition of The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk. Organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with Maison de Jean Paul Gaultier, the exhibit will travel from Montreal to Dallas November 13 for a three-month stay in the fashion capital of the Lone Star State.
Featuring approximately 130 looks, the exhibit spans Gaultier’s evolution from his inaugural days as fashions “l’enfant terrible” in the 1970s to ensembles that had roles in films, stage costumes and concerts in the subsequent years until 2010, even including two of Madonna’s infamous and iconic corsets from her 1990 Blonde Ambition tour.
Sketches, costumes, excerpts from film and runway shows, interviews and fashion photography will feature prominently and help to explore the impact Gaultier’s avant-garde creations had on the fashion world and society in general and forced people to face the mirror and challenge conventional beauty of the past. The designs, along with supplemental photographs, sound bites and sketches, are organized into six thematic sections, following Gaultier’s evolution from the streets of Paris to the punk culture of the 1980s and beyond.
Following the Dallas exhibition, The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier will travel to the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, and then on to Madrid in the summer 2012 before wrapping up in Kunsthal Rotterdam, the Netherlands in the spring of 2013.
For more information regarding The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk, www.mbam.qc.ca or www.dm-art.org.
