Jean Paul Gaultier

Men's skirts, navy shirts, armored corsets from the banlieue to haute couture, Jean-Paul Gaultier, the enfant terrible of fashion, redefined beauty and disrupted gender boundaries with a freedom and irreverence impossible to ignore. Simply put, he’s your designer’s favorite designer. 

A self-taught fashion designer, initiated into sewing by his grandmother in the suburbs of Paris, Jean-Paul Gaultier had Pierre Cardin as his master, and in 1976 he launched his own Jean Paul Gaultier label. With his brand he began his very personal unabashed reflection on beauty and gender, on diversity and inclusion, in ways clearly ahead of its time.

Since 1993, the French fashion house Gaultier has launched a line of fragrances, led first by the legendary perfume-bust Classique and Le mâle. Fragile and the unisex Gaultier² women's fragrance followed, but Fleur du Male and Ma Dame also bear the designer's signature. Gaultier's fragrances, in addition to being big sellers, have imprinted themselves on everyone’s imagination thanks to those sculptural bottles depicting the male and female torso, encased in canning tins.

With spectacular runway shows, Jean-Paul Gaultier overturned conventions, deconstructing gender, blurring demarcations between femininity and masculinity, mixing dress code and cultural references from around the world. From his rise in the 1980s to the present, he has stood out as a key figure in the Olympus of French and international fashion, whose codes he has happily shaken for decades, until his farewell to the fashion shows in 2020. Now 70, Jean Paul Gualtiuer may no longer be the enfant terrible of fashion, but he will certainly remain its enfant éternel. 

Similar brands: Dries Van Noten, Bode, Marni, Kenzo, Maison Margiela, GmbH