tag:theconversation.com,2011:/au/topics/jean-paul-gaultier-13025/articles
Jean Paul Gaultier – The Conversation
2014-11-27T19:26:15Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/32033
2014-11-27T19:26:15Z
2014-11-27T19:26:15Z
Jean Paul Gaultier: how to make (or bake) a blockbuster
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65673/original/image-20141127-4225-1ornwuh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Gaultier's clothes adopt elements of satire, visual puns and the ridiculous to critique what we wear.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">NGV, Brooke Holm</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>French fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier – whose designs are featured at the <a href="http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/jeanpaulgaultier/home">National Gallery of Victoria</a> (NGV) until February 2015 – has always had an unsettling relationship with museum fashion exhibitions.</p>
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<span class="caption">Jean Paul Gaultier, 2005.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Peter Lindbergh</span></span>
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<p>For decades Gaultier resisted production of the classic retrospective exhibition surveying his design enterprises. Perhaps he was concerned with the concept of an environment occupied with rows of dressed mannequins aligned in chronological order, which seemed far removed from the contemporary designer’s engagement with street style or flamboyant nightclub culture. </p>
<p>Gaultier associated the “blockbuster” museum exhibition, which looks back over a large body of work recognising success and critical acclaim, with dead designers removed from fashion currency or relevance.</p>
<p>But the fashion context is a challenging one, in representation of human experience, appearance, narratives about circulation and consumption, transience, cultural conditions, design process and thinking.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://theconversation.com/fashion-victims-how-clothes-took-over-our-art-galleries-32946">contemporary fashion exhibition</a> imparts an influential voice about design practice. Museum media circulates fashion ideas to a wide range of people and explores fashion’s relationship to other things. </p>
<h2>Bakers and seamstresses</h2>
<p>Ten years ago there was an overview of Gaultier’s most famous designs held at <a href="http://fondation.cartier.com/#/en/home/">Cartier Foundation of Contemporary Art</a> in Paris. The exhibition – <a href="http://fondation.cartier.com/#/en/art-contemporain/26/exhibitions/294/all-the-exhibitions/615/pain-couture-by-jean-paul-gaultier/">Pain Couture</a> (High Fashion Bread) – focused attention upon artisanal practice, yet displayed no fashionable clothes.</p>
<p>Instead of showing examples from past and present clothing collections, the traditional Parisian crafts of baking and sewing were united when Gaultier collaborated with French bakers to knead, craft and bake his most famous clothing designs. </p>
<p>Bread garments offered an understanding of fashion concerned with making processes and detail of form. Well-known garments represented included Madonna’s iconic bra dress – which featured brioche cups. The abstraction of garments into bread forms was imaginative and quirky. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Jean Paul Gaultier speaks about Pain Couture in 2004.</span></figcaption>
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<p>The exhibition drew attention to unique bread-making practices, which were threatened by generic bread franchises operating in Paris. In this context, transience was the design solution – and ran contrary to the “permanance” associated with museums. </p>
<p>The garments were destined to gradually harden and be reduced to crumbs. When the show was over there was nothing left to archive.</p>
<p>Therefore one might be curious why Gaultier finally decided to become involved with and support the large retrospective at the NGV this year. After all, this show exemplifies the ceaseless activity of fashion design practices, set in museum conditions. </p>
<p>Like Pain Couture, the exhibition is mesmerising because of its close encounters with artisanal practices. In both, the attention to detail is profound. </p>
<h2>Gaultier’s design practice</h2>
<p>The NGV exhibition is engaged with real clothing, drawn from the designer’s archive. The assemblage of clothes and related imagery shows the power of fashion to imaginatively and provocatively dress the body. The garments on display embody complex dress ideas – and they epitomise the best European fabrication techniques.</p>
<p>The exhibition’s allure is found in selection of so many “recognised” garments. We see items that have become familiar thanks to the celebrities who have worn them. Appropriately, to display the 160 garments and associated materials that make up the exhibition, the museum is transformed into catwalk, nightclub, streetscape and boudoir.</p>
<p>Gaultier describes himself as an artisan because, like the bread-maker, his enterprise creates high-quality, distinctive products using traditional or labour intensive methods. </p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jean Paul Gaultier, French Cancan collection, women’s prêt-à-porter, autumn-winter 1991-1992.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Patrice Stable/Jean Paul Gaultier</span></span>
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<p>But fashion is a collective practice, so Gaultier’s artisanal enterprise involves scores of people working across design, production and distribution areas. This is an industry of scale not singularity.</p>
<p>Mannequins enlivened by projected animated (and talking) faces reference the human experience of wearing clothes. There is plenty of novel interactive engagement with display mannequins. This too subverts the museum space as the mannequins greet or disturb the passerby with an occasional wink or song.</p>
<p>But what impression of Gaultier’s design practice does the NGV show leave?</p>
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<span class="caption">The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">NGV, Brooke Holm</span></span>
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<p>Gaultier’s creations are playful, contest ordered systems of dress with idiosyncratic clothing juxtapositions. We see assemblages which mix genres, gender associations, recycle fashion history and cultural dress traditions. The clothes adopt elements of satire, visual puns and the ridiculous to critique what we wear.</p>
<p>There is a curious tension and synergy between provocative garments produced in earlier decades with flamboyant and intricately detailed creations forged for haute couture.</p>
<p>In late 1970s-1980s Gaultier was generally described by fashion journalists as an <em>enfant terrible</em> because his collections provoked stereotypical understandings of clothing from standard dress archetypes, included distinctions between outerwear and underwear to gender associations with business suits and skirts.</p>
<p>A male-skirted suit designed in 1985 – on display – was designed as a practical alternative to trousers, but it was commercially unsuccessful. It was viewed as a novelty, an attempt to shock the fashion world. The uptake was slow; Sarah Mower writing for Arena magazine noted only 3,000 suits were produced worldwide.</p>
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<span class="caption">Russia collection 1997 (detail), haute couture autumn-winter 1997-1998.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">NGV, Rainer Torrado</span></span>
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<p>Haute couture garments also attract notoriety. Jean Paul Gaultier first showed in the Paris haute couture collections in 1997, when currency of this exclusive mode was being threatened by diminishing markets. </p>
<p>Yet craftsmanship is only one aspect of Gaultier’s foray into haute couture, where he injected into this fashion arena different readings of beauty and gender, with collections worn by models like Austrian drag singer Conchita Wurst.</p>
<p>On display, the taffeta evening gown with “leopard skin” bead embroidery with rhinestone claws from Russia collection autumn/winter 1997-98 for is recognised in the exhibition by noting more than 1,000 hours of workmanship in its making. </p>
<p>The <em>trompe l’oeil</em> beaded leopard fur dress shows the artisanal practices of haute couture through invention of new surfaces and manipulation of diverse materials. Rich technical palettes are built up from applied decoration using beads, tucks, embroidery, drapery and pleating.</p>
<p>In an industry dominated by fast fashion, homogenised styling and designed obsolescence, it is timely that an exhibition of clothes reminds us of the power of artisanal practice – and that great fashion design is thought-provoking and transformative.</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><em><a href="http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/jeanpaulgaultier/home">The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk</a> is on show at the National Gallery of Victoria until February 8, 2015.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/32033/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robyn Healy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
French fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier – whose designs are featured at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) until February 2015 – has always had an unsettling relationship with museum fashion exhibitions…
Robyn Healy, Deputy Head of Research and Innovation in the School of Fashion and Textiles, RMIT University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/32946
2014-11-12T19:30:32Z
2014-11-12T19:30:32Z
Fashion victims? How clothes took over our art galleries
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/64208/original/xzmxmdyn-1415681244.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Romance Was Born designers Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales join the trend for fashion exhibitions, at the NGV.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Narelle Wilson</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Australia’s art galleries are currently enthralled by fashion. </p>
<p>In Melbourne <a href="http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/jeanpaulgaultier">Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk</a> and <a href="http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/exhibitions/romance-was-born-kids-project">Express Yourself: Romance Was Born for Kids</a>, are both at NGV; Adelaide’s <a href="http://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au/agsa/home/Exhibitions/NowShowing/Fashion_Icons.html">Fashion Icons: Masterpieces from the Musée des Arts Décoratifs</a> is at the Art Gallery of South Australia and Brisbane’s <a href="http://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/exhibitions/current/futurebeauty">Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion</a>, is showing at GOMA. </p>
<p>The fashion for fashion exhibitions is not confined to major state galleries. Bendigo Art Gallery has just closed <a href="http://www.bendigoartgallery.com.au/Exhibitions/Current_Exhibitions/Undressed_350_years_of_fashion_in_underwear">Undressed: 350 years of Underwear in Fashion</a>, after establishing a strong fashion exhibition niche by partnering with London’s V&A Museum to show <a href="http://www.bendigoartgallery.com.au/Exhibitions/Past_Exhibitions/2009_Exhibition_Archive/The_Golden_Age_of_Couture">The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947-57</a> in 2009. </p>
<p>On the west coast, an exhibition created by Sydney’s Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, <a href="http://museum.wa.gov.au/museums/perth/frock-stars-inside-australian-fashion-week">Frock Stars: inside Australian Fashion Week</a>, has been showing at the Western Australian Museum.</p>
<p>Most of these result from carefully negotiated partnerships with international museums: the V&A; the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; the Montreal Museum of Fine Art; the Kyoto Costume Institute, and fashion houses such as Maison Jean Paul Gaultier. </p>
<p>They are part of a worldwide trend for fashion exhibitions in art museums.</p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Andreja Pejic
in The Boy Can’t Help It for 7 Hollywood magazine, Fantasy Edition 2013.
Dévoreuse corset, Confession of a Child of the Century collection, Jean Paul Gaultier, haute couture, autumn-winter 2012-2013.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Alix Malka</span></span>
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<p>Some of this emerges from a longstanding commitment to collecting fashion and textiles. The critically acclaimed and spectacularly well-attended exhibition, <a href="http://blog.metmuseum.org/alexandermcqueen/">Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty</a>, at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2011 was enriched by the museum’s well established collecting and research focus. </p>
<p>Likewise, the NGV fashion exhibitions sit logically within its collection and research directions. But the fashion for fashion exhibitions is not confined to art or design museums with significant fashion collections. So what’s going on?</p>
<p>We all have bodies, we all wear clothes; we all observe others wearing clothes. Whether people acknowledge an interest in fashion or not everyone is surrounded by it. </p>
<p>People interested in fashion no longer rely on magazines and image blogs to keep up; live streaming of couture and ready to wear collections gives instant access to what’s being shown, who the celebrities are, which designers are doing what. </p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Comme des Garçons, dress, ready to wear, Autumn-Winter 2012-2013, Les Arts Décoratifs, Mode et Textile collection, purchased with the support of Louis Vuitton, 2012. Right : Valentino, evening suit, haute couture, Autumn-Winter 2007-2008, Les Arts Décoratifs, Mode et Textile collection, in association with Valentino, 2008.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Thierry Dreyfus for Eyesight Group.</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Looking at dress and adornment can be aesthetic, sensual and visceral; experienced and understood in different ways by people of all ages and genders. Museum fashion exhibitions amplify varieties of visual experience and give access to research-based fashion knowledge. They provide a rare glimpse into the materiality of high fashion objects; haute couture garments and textiles; volume and drape; colour, texture, surface; and details of inventive highly skilled artisanship. </p>
<p>Visitors to exhibitions such as Jean Paul Gaultier in Melbourne and Fashion Icons in Adelaide, where the garments are shown without the impediment of glass, can see close-up the allure and charisma of these material objects. </p>
<p>Museum audiences understand how fashion’s periodic ruptures – in conception, style, materials – are linked to cultural history, music, street trends and other manifestations of zeitgeist. Audience interest in fashion objects, processes, history, technologies, internal systems, narratives and mythologies is parallelled by contemporary critical knowledge emerging from the burgeoning academic field of Fashion Studies. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/64309/original/bg4f3th3-1415746374.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/64309/original/bg4f3th3-1415746374.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/64309/original/bg4f3th3-1415746374.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=763&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/64309/original/bg4f3th3-1415746374.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=763&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/64309/original/bg4f3th3-1415746374.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=763&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/64309/original/bg4f3th3-1415746374.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=959&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/64309/original/bg4f3th3-1415746374.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=959&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/64309/original/bg4f3th3-1415746374.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=959&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Comme des Garçons (Rei Kawakubo) / Spring/Summer 1997 / Collection: Kyoto Costume Institute.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Takashi Hatakeyama</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Fashion scholarship explores aesthetics, gender, sexuality, class, custom and culture, not to mention economic history, textile technology, film and popular culture, and any number of related questions. Why wouldn’t people be fascinated by exhibitions which augment knowledge and pleasure in this field? </p>
<p>New course development, scholarly journals, and almost exponential rates of scholarly and popular publishing are occurring simultaneously with the growth of fashion exhibiting in museums. The exhibition phenomenon itself is critically contextualised in publications such as <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18464998-fashion-and-museums">Fashion and Museums: Theory and Practice</a> (2014) and <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17802904-exhibiting-fashion">Exhibiting Fashion: Before and After 1971</a> (2014).</p>
<p>All of this is occurring at a time when hierarchies – what is deemed worthy or unworthy of museum space, what is considered fine or applied art – are collapsing. </p>
<p>When Art Gallery of New South Wales curator, Jane de Teliga, presented her exhibition Art Clothes in 1980, she told me “a lot of noses were out of joint” about the idea of fashion in the gallery. Some of her colleagues thought it inappropriate for fashion to share museum space with art. </p>
<p>Some still roll their eyes, reiterating familiar themes of inanity, frivolity and superficiality that have accompanied fashion since its modern inception in the 19th century. Nonetheless Art Clothes was quickly followed at The Art Gallery of NSW by the ambitious Fabulous Fashion 1907-67 from the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1981) and Yves Saint Laurent Retrospective (1987). </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/64214/original/qvp4r9c5-1415683566.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/64214/original/qvp4r9c5-1415683566.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/64214/original/qvp4r9c5-1415683566.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/64214/original/qvp4r9c5-1415683566.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/64214/original/qvp4r9c5-1415683566.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/64214/original/qvp4r9c5-1415683566.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/64214/original/qvp4r9c5-1415683566.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/64214/original/qvp4r9c5-1415683566.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Anastasia Klose, One stop knock-off shop 2013, T-shirts, posters, mugs, furniture, lucky cats, dimensions (variable).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Anastasia Klose courtesy Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Contemporary artist Anastasia’s Klose’s <a href="http://anastasiaklose.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/the-one-stop-knock-off-shop-performanceconcept-store/">One-Stop Knock-Off Shop</a> installation , at the NGV’s <a href="http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/melbournenow">Melbourne Now</a> (2013/14) placed art and fashion in their rightfully ambiguous context, in which the cultural interface and the cash nexus of art and fashion are playfully unmasked.</p>
<p>Today’s museum directors have to generate exhibition ticket sales, partners, sponsors and, above all, positive publicity. They have to keep established audiences, attract new ones and seed the audiences of the future through programs for kids. They need to create an air of excitement and relevance around their institutions. </p>
<p>All of this while maintaining cultural integrity and supporting the original research which creates new knowledge. </p>
<p>Whether fashion is art; whether the art world is now all about fashion; whether fashion is commercialising the art museum are questions much less interesting than the immediacy, provocation, knowledge and pleasure we gain from the fashion for fashion.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/32946/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sally Gray is a Visiting Scholar in Cultural History at UNSW Art & Design, she has in the past received research funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>
Australia’s art galleries are currently enthralled by fashion. In Melbourne Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk and Express Yourself: Romance Was Born for Kids, are both at NGV; Adelaide’s…
Sally Gray, Visiting Scholar in Cultural History, School of Art History and Art Education, UNSW Art & Design, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/32806
2014-10-21T19:14:59Z
2014-10-21T19:14:59Z
Jean Paul Gaultier and the true history of the fashion stripe
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62423/original/tgttsc26-1413931266.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The stripe is the mark of the ordinary seaman, never of the officer.
</span> </figcaption></figure><p>The publicity material for <a href="http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/jeanpaulgaultier">The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier</a> exhibition, which opened last week at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), unsurprisingly came decked in stripes. </p>
<p>The blue and white bars of the Breton jersey, worn by French sailors since the mid-19th century and made fashionable by Coco Chanel at the end of the first world war, have dressed promotional films, merchandise, catalogues, and the figures of those invited to the opening. </p>
<p>So, what is the history of the stripe in fashion?</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62308/original/bdn9xwwn-1413848542.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62308/original/bdn9xwwn-1413848542.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62308/original/bdn9xwwn-1413848542.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=823&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62308/original/bdn9xwwn-1413848542.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=823&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62308/original/bdn9xwwn-1413848542.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=823&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62308/original/bdn9xwwn-1413848542.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1035&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62308/original/bdn9xwwn-1413848542.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1035&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62308/original/bdn9xwwn-1413848542.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1035&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pierre et Gilles, Portrait of Jean Paul Gaultier 1990, painted photograph, 112.0x92.0cm, private collection, Paris.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Pierre et Gilles/Rainer Torrado</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The <em>marinière</em> is inseparably associated with Parisian <a href="http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/jeanpaulgaultier/overview/biography">Gaultier</a>, who has repeatedly included it in his fashion collections over a 40-year career. At the same time, together with the beret and neckerchief, the sailor stripe goes shorthand for a style that is stereotypically, parodically French.</p>
<p>The horizontal bands remain the most vivid and playful example of a surface decoration more notable for its banality and ubiquity. </p>
<p>The stripe is seen everywhere from the pinstriped business suit, with its accompanying shirt and tie, to the pastel stripes of our pyjamas and bed linen, to the emblematic blazery of the school uniform and football strip. </p>
<p>We are seemingly at home with the contemporary stripe and its implications of rectitude, comfort, identity and energy.</p>
<h2>The stripe as mark of the social outsider</h2>
<p>It has not always been so. If the wearing of stripes seems a trivial matter, subject to the whims of fashion and the conventions of work and leisure, <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-12366-2/the-devils-cloth">there was a time</a> when to be striped was indeed to be barred, to be marked as socially marginalised or excluded.</p>
<p>Medieval art frequently depicts, and sumptuary laws (that attempt to regulate consumption) often required, the wearing of striped clothing by the criminal, crippled, and insane. It marks those plying dishonourable trades, such as the prostitute and butcher, and those whose employment entails a degree of disruptiveness, such as the minstrel and clown. </p>
<p>In painting and literature, and sometimes in heraldry, its presence is a marker of treachery, rebelliousness, and cruelty.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62313/original/7fq9jjb2-1413852728.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62313/original/7fq9jjb2-1413852728.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62313/original/7fq9jjb2-1413852728.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62313/original/7fq9jjb2-1413852728.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62313/original/7fq9jjb2-1413852728.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62313/original/7fq9jjb2-1413852728.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62313/original/7fq9jjb2-1413852728.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62313/original/7fq9jjb2-1413852728.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) demonstration, women dressed in prison-stripe costumes, carrying chains, c1945.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kheel Center</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>All that may seem of another age. Yet the stripe has never quite shaken its earlier connotations of (in-)subordination. If the early modern period sees its gradual social acceptance, it remains primarily the livery of the lower classes and persists in the striped vest of the butler and uniform of the chambermaid. And it is from here, perhaps, that it makes its way out to sea. </p>
<p>For the stripe is the mark of the ordinary seaman, never of the officer.</p>
<p>Until recently, horizontal stripes paired with vertical bars signified the enclosure of the prison cell or the internment of the concentration camp, the memory of which seems recently to have eluded <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/fashion/zara-drops-childrens-shirt-after-comparisons-to-nazi-concentration-camp-uniforms-20140828-1099mk.html">an international clothing label</a>.</p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gwen Stefani at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards, New York.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Dimitrios Kambouris/Fashion Wire Daily</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We might conjecture that it was its association with the subjugated or disenfranchised that led to the adoption of the tricoloured stripe as symbol of rebellion and liberation during the revolutions in the United States and France.</p>
<p>Today we come in all stripes. The emblematic band of provenance and identity, of the coat of arms and national flag, attaches itself to the uniform. The sign of social liminality we bestow on children, while unconsciously acknowledging that an adult swathed in stripes would be, at best, an eccentric.</p>
<p>The deviant stripe of the demi-mondaine, bohemian, or scoundrel crossed the line into popular culture in the 1950s and 60s. And the upright stripe of the 1930s pinstripe suit, armour of the modern warrior, has never been able to free itself from ambivalence, for it is only the changing subtleties of contrast and width that separate the stripes of the Wall Street banker from those of the Hollywood gangster.</p>
<p>Finally, witness the recent appearance on our intimate apparel of the pastel stripe, unable to decide whether it aspires to the purity of white or the vivacity of colour. </p>
<h2>The stripe as cultural marker</h2>
<p>It is hazardous to offer an aesthetic or psychological explanation for the symbolism and ideology of the stripe. </p>
<p>Yet there are clear perceptual differences between the neutrality and inertia of the plain surface, the orderliness of the patterned surface, on which background and foreground are distinguishable, and the pulsation of the striped surface, where no hierarchy of planes is evident.</p>
<p>To follow its lines crossways is to be in perpetual transition. To follow them lengthways is to be in dynamic flight – the reason, perhaps, for their popularity in sportswear.</p>
<p>If the restlessness of the stripe is a sign of disorder, its regularity is the imposition of order. The comb, bookshelf, fence, barcode; all are means of ordering the disorderly. The stripe, in a profound sense, is the inscription of culture itself.</p>
<p>The motley tunic once marked the exclusion and reintegration of the medieval fringe-dweller. Is that now the lot of all of us?</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><em>The National Gallery of Victoria will host a series of public talks on the <a href="http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/jeanpaulgaultier/events/program-highlights">Colourful History of the Stripe</a> on Saturdays October 25, November 1 and 8.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/32806/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sean Ryan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The publicity material for The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier exhibition, which opened last week at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), unsurprisingly came decked in stripes. The blue and white…
Sean Ryan, Senior Lecturer, RMIT University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.