Although many Junior Gaultier items were included in the mainline catwalk shows, in Fall / Winter 1992 they had their own mini collection entitled “The Nightmare”. Unsurprisingly a vampire character was to crop up in magazine adverts promoting the collection with the advert below being subtly updated with a bespeckled vampire to promote the Junior Gaultier sunglasses range.
I don’t know why the early black and white Dracula movies scared me so much as a kid, because Dracula was always overly dramatic and moved quite slowly! Together with me being in bed before dark and not being a nubile young woman, made me relatively safe from his fangs.
Even so, he was my favourite horror character next to a werewolf and that could be why I love this t-shirt so much. The mix of text and bold graphics, complete with gothic typeface in shiny resinous paint, makes this one of my favourite Junior Gaultier T-shirts. As we know, Jean Paul Gaultier has been influenced by many fictional characters, such as Robin Hood, The Prisoner, Fantômas and The Pieds Nickelés trio, so why shouldn’t Dracula be spared?!
Being a vampire sucks
The vampire character in this t-shirt I am wearing looks suspiciously like David Peel, a handsome British actor who created one of the most memorable vampires in horror film history: “Baron Meinster” in Hammer Films’ The Brides of Dracula (1960). The mugshot is framed and surrounded by text sections from an imaginary newspaper chronicling horrific goings on. Read about The Frankenstein Saga, dip into the Encyclopaedia of Horror and recoil at The Supernatural.
Several versions of horror-inspired designs exist, including Christopher Lee’s doubleganger biting a young lady’s neck, a gothic-looking woman titled “Vampira” and a colour block version of Nosferatu, the first vampire movie ever made.
Vampira gives me the willies
The Vampira reference is likely to be of Maila Nurmi, a horror movie TV host of the late-night 1950s, although there was a 1974 British comedy horror film of the same name, starring David Niven as Count Dracula. In this movie Dracula attempts to revive his long-lost love, Vampira by a blood transfusion, collecting blood from a bevy of Playboy playmates visiting his castle. However, one of the Playmates whose blood is drained is black, turning the revived Vampira into a black woman!
Thankfully such films are no longer made and fangs for reading.
The vampire suit
The red T-shirt I’m wearing is also from the collection, focusing on one part of the newspaper graphic. The same gothic font spells out “Junior”, but instead of the shiny paint, the word is highlighted using a red flocking. This technique was to crop up again in 1998, in what’s often referred to as the “Vampire Suit”, a Gaultier Jean’s black jean jacket and matching trousers with red flocking, suggestive of dripping blood.
Vampire couture in 2014
Gaultier returned to the theme of vampires, ghosts, and monsters for his couture show of Fall / Winter 2014. Just like the immaculately dressed characters from the 1992 movie “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”, Gaultier’s vampires looked like they’d never spent a night in a dusty coffin in their lives (or their afterlives).
Gaultier created the drama of gothic horror through stunning tailoring of textures in colours he described as “blood red, virginal white, black Sabbath, the silver of a knife, and the gold of religion.”
Dangerous yet alluring vampires sported red eye makeup (do vampires suffer from hay fever?), peroxide pompadour hairstyles, and more hoods and ruffles than you could shake a wooden stake at, completed the look.
A crinoline skirt adorned with a menacing appliqué chain formed an inescapable cage and there was also a black velvet jogging suit, should you be struggling to make it back to your castle before dawn.
Although in an otherworldly guise, the elegant vampire models adhered to Gaultier’s longstanding theme of female empowerment, with Vogue’s Suzy Menkes remarking “They were strong women, heaving with sexuality and attitude, as Gaultier first invented them in the 1980s.”
Marcellous L. Jones, writing for Fashion Insider Magazine, quotes Gaultier from his opening presentation “I had been seeing a lot of movies with vampires in them. They were everywhere. So this is how I got the idea to do a collection about them. But of course, I do it in my own way.”
