After 35 years, Jean Paul Gaultier, top, says the industry is going "a very strange way." Styles from 1993. Le Pigeon

In the 1980s and '90s, Jean Paul Gaultier was a fashion superstar, designing Madonna's conical bras and couture skirts for men, and that controversial collection for fall 1993 with coats and hats styled after Hasidic attire.

But preparing for his spring fashion show in his broiling Paris studio in September, he tells an assistant: "Take a photo of that one, so I remember it is no good and not to try it again."

The onetime enfant terrible turns 60 in April. His couture is still brilliant and daring. But his ready-to-wear has been hit or miss. In May, Hermes sold its 45 percent stake in Mr. Gaultier's business to the Puig Group, the Spanish fragrance company that owns Carolina Herrera and Nina Ricci, for 16 million euros, or $23 million. Puig also assumed about $20 million in debt.

Now it may be time for a reassessment.

Days after the spring show in September, Mr. Gaultier was asked if he still felt appreciated.

"Yes, not as much as before, but yes," he said. "I am no more the flavor of the month, or the year, or the decade, but it has been 35 years. I can say in some way I am lucky, when I look at the people who were there with me at the beginning, and I am the one who is still here. I am still appreciated, but not for the same reason."

His spring collection was filled with a nostalgia for the way things used to be, as when his runway models carried numbered cards to identify their outfits.

Also, the tattoo-print body stockings, split-leg sailor pants, mariner stripes, trench coats and lacy lingerie were all reiterations of ideas he has shown throughout his career. The clothes were well received - one of his "most legible and effortlessly chic collections," according to WWD. His fall collection was shown on March 3.

An exhibition of Mr. Gaultier's designs now touring North America is a reminder of his influence.

"The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk," drew more than 175,000 to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts last summer. It moves to the de Young Museum in San Francisco on March 24.

The exhibition, which includes Madonna's satin corsetry and an evening gown from 1993 embellished with crystal beads depicting nipples and pubic hair, illustrates how Mr. Gaultier has always been transgressive, but generous, in his social messages. He has employed models of various sizes and skin colors, while ignoring presumed boundaries of gender or sexuality. Nevertheless, his antics, like a fashion show with women mud wrestling in 2009, can sometimes backfire, overshadowing his hard work.

The exhibit makes a case for his workmanship and imaginativeness, his knack of taking a classic element of French dress and, as Tom Ford says in the catalog, "twisting it into something else."

Mr. Gaultier recently described a fashion industry "where things are going in a very strange way." Fashion shows, now covered instantaneously online, seem more about image than clothes. Celebrities who once paid him for dresses now expect to be paid to wear them. The large design houses are expected to churn out more and more clothes. "It's like a big cake, and there's not enough people to eat it," he said.

While he has played an important role in popular culture with his stint as a "Eurotrash" host and by designing wardrobes for films like "The Fifth Element," "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover" and "Bad Education," he can be provocative, as when he evoked the singer Amy Winehouse for his spring couture collection in January, barely six months after her death.

The reaction to the exhibition seems to have energized him.

"I didn't realize it at the beginning, but I did this profession to get love," he said.

The New York Times

(China Daily 03/11/2012 page12)