Ludovic de Saint Sernin is just too younger to know “Gilligan’s Island,” the American sitcom that stretched a shipwreck storyline with solely seven castaways into three very foolish seasons.
As this season’s visitor couturier at Jean Paul Gaultier, de Saint Sernin spun his personal fantasy story of maritime catastrophe, however with a boatload of characters way more fascinating and sensual than the professor and Mary Ann.
“The concept was to create a narrative that might encourage folks and make them dream about couture,” he stated throughout a preview within the atelier. “There’s class, there’s luxurious, there’s lust – the entire feelings that you may take into consideration on a shipwreck.”
On Wednesday night time, mermaids, pirates, sailors, sea monsters, and a “without end bride” spilled out onto the catwalk at Jean Paul Gaultier headquarters on the Rue Saint Martin, every of their horny outfits given a cheeky title within the run-of-show textual content, a home custom stretching again to the founder’s glory days.
You possibly can simply see the place the DNA of de Saint Sernin and Gaultier sync up – corset lacing, theatrical eroticism, physique range, and an anything-goes method to sexuality and gender.
For essentially the most half, de Saint Sernin let Gaultier’s tailoring legacy sink together with the ship, and targeted on almost bare, body-skimming attire with a wide range of floor textures, evoking fish netting, seaweed or black sand clinging to moist flesh, a wink to a favourite Herb Ritts photograph of Cindy Crawford rolling on a seashore.
The present might have used extra selection, however it held your consideration with visible jokes: a barely-there robe fronted with solely an anchor for modesty, and a Madonna-esque corset with spoked ship wheels in lieu of cone-shaped bra cups.
De Saint Sernin marveled on the capabilities of the seamstresses, and their willingness to “give you new methods of expressing couture and have enjoyable with it.”
For instance, he tasked them to approximate crocodile hides with latex, which they completed with uncanny accuracy for a slinky sea-monster tailcoat and robe.
He additionally put a brand new spin on Gaultier’s signature “morphing” method: On a fishtail robe match for a Celtic princess, dense crystal beading in a tartan sample yielded to black ostrich feathers drenched in glycerine.
“It’s such an unimaginable luxurious to have the ability to do couture and and the atelier is so beneficiant, so mild, so educated, and the connection that we constructed is so valuable. I’m going to overlook them so much,” stated de Saint Sernin, who shimmied out for his bow and made a beeline for Gaultier, embracing him like a rescuer.