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My Bowie: Jean Paul Gaultier

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The fashion designer explains the incredible clothes

Photograph by Masayoshi Sukita

I was living in Paris when I first experienced Bowie's music, and the influence was instant and permanent. He was in a dress for the sleeve of The Man Who Sold the World -- there was a sense of ambiguity and originality that was incredible at the time. He was demonstrating that a man could be powerfully feminine; he didn't have to aspire to be John Wayne. Even the fact that he was married to a woman [Angie Bowie] who was also a lesbian gave all of us permission to love who we wanted to love. I remember going to gay bars in London that Bowie was known to frequent and it gave many of us courage not to hide, to have confidence in ourselves.

I was working for Pierre Cardin in Manila in the Philippines in 1975, and I used "Diamond Dogs" for the opening of my first show. In 1978, I saw him in Paris for the Low/"Heroes" tour, and the set was entirely composed of white neon. It was unique; no one did things like that then. At the beginning of the show, he appeared as a kind of Marlene Dietrich, but with a white captain's jacket and a cap -- it was obvious that it was not Bowie playing a captain, but Bowie playing Marlene Dietrich playing a man. One thing that was astonishing was his ability to do cinema and music simultaneously, while endlessly reinventing himself. It wasn't only his androgyny but his creativity -- he was among the first people to discover Kansai Yamamoto, who made incredible clothes for his Ziggy Stardust era. In that way he was always a pioneer. He had a Dadaist approach to his work; he would cut everything up and put things together in new ways that made them fresh and radical. I remember when [French newspaper] Liberation dedicated an entire issue, cover to cover, to Bowie. It was unique. They did it later with Michael Jackson. They didn't do it as completely for Madonna.

30 Years of Out100Out / Advocate Magazine - Jonathan Groff and Wayne Brady

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Jean Paul Gaultier