Jean P Gaultier shows ”Bread Couture”
On Sunday the glass facade of Jean Nouvel’s Fondation Cartier in Paris was curtained with 4000 baguettes to create “Pain Couture” (Bread Couture), realising a dream of French fashion wonder boy, Jean-Paul Gaultier.
The wild work saw the art house being converted into a giant bakery to create an entire collection of clothes in dough.
It’s probably the French capital’s most-titillating must-see exhibition of the summer. “Pain Couture” by the 52-year-old Gaultier combines his childhood dream of one day becoming a baker with his current status as fashion icon.
Behind primly-tied beaded curtains of string and buns and as the sweet tantalising smell of fresh bread noses up nostrils, Gaultier offers a fantasy-land of big breads, thin loaves, butter croissants, meringues, ladyfingers and bakers’ wicker baskets, all transformed to evoke couture.
“Baking and fashion have a lot in common,” Gaultier told the press. “But the real pleasure was just surprising people and inventing.”
There are thongs, boots, bags, brollies and even high-heeled shoes sculpted in dough, wicker worked as bustiers or the conical bras he made for Madonna.
Jean Paul Gaultier and his bread Madonna corset we showed you on Tuesday
“It’s a fantasy, a story-book, each dress tells a tale, and Gaultier’s the magician who waved the wand,” Herve Chandes, director of the Fondation Cartier, where the exhivbition runs until October 10, 2004, said in an interview.
Gaultier had worked months with bakers to produce the items, refusing to use anything but fresh leavened edible bread. So a bakery had been specially installed in the basement of the museum to replace rotten loaves and to sell fresh bread to visitors during the four-month show, with the proceeds going to a charity for poor French people.
“It’s a works-in-progress, a four-month-long performance. The uncertainty about the effect of time is part of the exhibition. The crumbs and bread-dust from the clothes are part of the aesthetics of the project,” Chandes said.
From an article by Tiscali Fashion, thanks to MadonnaTribe Team members Paolo, Lique and Ditaboy.