Jean Paul Gaultier’s Fin de Siècle Spring/Summer 1995 collection redefined modern fashion by blending vintage styles with contemporary silhouettes, creating a distinctive “old-meets-new” aesthetic.
At a glance:
Collection: Fin de Siècle
Season: Spring/Summer 1995
Location: Paris
Theme: 20th-century fashion remix
The collection
Jean Paul Gaultier’s Spring/Summer 1995 collection “Fin de Siècle” focused on a century of fashion, fusing historical and modern elements, such as Edwardian silhouettes and Lycra. One key outfit, a nude Lycra mermaid dress, emphasised volume through chiffon layers that flared dramatically at the knees, topped with a black lace overlay depicting the Eiffel Tower. Also included were iconic Renaissance works of art, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam.
I don’t have many main line items, but I do love this shirt, with its elaborate baroque-style border featuring ornate scrollwork, lions’ heads, acanthus leaves, floral motifs, and decorative medallions. Like the sarong, it’s reminiscent of the engraved imagery found on banknotes or currency, consistent with the Spring/Summer 1994 “Le Grande Voyage” banknote aesthetic I’ve covered before. Inside the frame are two figures: a tall woman stands in a corset, arching backwards in a theatrical and cabaret-like pose, with pierced nipples, whilst a seated JPG tattoos the woman’s arm with the year ’95, after previously crossing out the years ’92, ’93, and ’94.
The show
Conducting pre-show interviews from an antique velvet-lined magic box that, through a trick of mirrors, made him appear to have no body, Jean Paul told Vogue’s Laird Borrelli-Persson that he didn’t want to repeat history: “It’s not modern to do an exact copy, you have to mix up the decades in order to achieve a modern silhouette.”
From the same box, a decapitated JPG elaborated to a CNN reporter, “I tried to capture a synthesis of each period: the silhouette that was the most important, the print, the fabrics. It’s a mix of the periods I love and admire, what I remember most about each of them. But it wasn’t pretentious. I’m not trying to make it better than they did then, because it’s impossible to make it better.”
The show’s epicentre was a carousel draped with sheer muslin and lit from within. As it began to turn, instead of horses, women were silhouetted through the fabric, appearing much like marionettes. The perfect start for a collection where Gaultier combines his favourite silhouettes from different decades to create outfits for the ’90s. Rather than a drab and musty venue, the lights and stalls were vibrant and perfect for a collection that breathed new life into elegant clothes from each decade: the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, and so on.
Lace, Lycra, and the Eiffel Tower
For me, that star of the show was the aforementioned fishtail dress, mixing underwear and eveningwear, blending modern materials with historical silhouettes, and the past with the present.
You could say dresses, plural, as this is constructed as a two-part ensemble. The underlying dress is a body-hugging, dark nude Lycra foundation that flares into a dramatic mermaid hem of layered chiffon. The black lace overlay piece has scenes of Paris by night (the moon and stars are out), the Eiffel Tower, and Gaultier’s initials woven into the design. Big, far-from-elegant chunky zippers secured both dresses.
I love the contrast between the softness of the nude Lycra and the structured black lace, echoing the steel-framed construction of the Eiffel Tower.
Gaultier the strongman
I love the imagery of our hero JPG posed as a circus strongman, with its antique framing and nostalgic circus-era mood. That’s how I read the one-shoulder leopard-skin garb. Circus strongmen were a major part of late-19th- and early-20th-century sideshows and travelling circus culture, often performing larger-than-life feats of human power. Gaultier’s humour and subversion of traditional body stereotypes, along with the use of leopard print, are all represented here. Jean Paul also used elements from the banknote print seen in the Spring/Summer 1994 collection, “Le Grande Voyage.”
The strongman theme was previously explored in “Casanova at the Gym” for Spring/Summer 1992, while the show invite artwork for “Adam and Eve: Rastas of Today” from Spring/Summer 1991 uses a variety of sideshow characters.
Looking to the future
While Spring 1995 looked back at the past 100 years, Fall 1995 looked into a post-apocalyptic future that fused op-art body prints, industrial styling, and a strong Amazonian woman power fantasy.
The finale: A Madonna Gaultier runway moment
I love a JPG finale, and although not as crazy as Fall/Winter 1992’s “Europe of the Future”, the show climaxed with theatrics courtesy of Madonna in a wedding dress pushing an antique pram whilst holding a white poodle.
Jean Paul Gaultier Spring/Summer 1995 Fin de Siècle runway show featuring Madonna’s iconic finale.