The name of this collection is taken from Les Pieds Nickelés (French for “the nickel-plated feet”), one of the earliest and longest-running French comic series, created by Louis Forton in 1908. The comics chart the exploits of three ne’er-do-wells, Croquignol, Filochard, and Ribouldingue, who are always getting in trouble. In French slang, “nickel-plated feet” was a name for slackers and work-shy people.
Referencing the characters
There’s a Junior Gaultier T-shirt that I’ve seen over the years and always wondered what the relevance of it was. After some investigations, I realise that it’s Croquignol, the leader of the group, who usually wears a monocle, a small hat, and a bow tie.
Junior Gaultier expert gaultierjuniorhigh drew my attention to a point-of-sale card that you can see me holding that features the trio. The model in the middle represents Filochard, who only has one eye and gains Herculean strength when angry.
Taking inspiration from Abstract Expressionism
It may be doing a disservice to the great Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock, in comparing the splatter pattern used in this collection and his radical “drip technique” of splashing paint onto a horizontal surface. Just like any creator, Pollock’s pieces were highly considered, and although his paintings look random and accidental, he insisted that he began each work with an idea of how it should look at the end.
Investigations into Pollock’s paintings show areas of different colours blending and bleeding into each other, indicating that they were applied close together in time. In contrast, elsewhere, the paint layers were dry before another layer was applied. There’s a very in-depth article on the physics of Jackson Pollock’s painting technique here.
What you see is what you get with this waistcoat, until on closer inspection you’ll notice a pinstripe of the same colour as the splatter pattern running through the fabric. In case you were wondering, the splatter pattern isn’t bleached into the fabric but is a pattern woven into the material.
The formal feel of the pinstripes, originally reserved for bankers, and the bleach splatter adopted by the skinhead subculture give that idea of an anti-establishment statement. Denim jeans splattered with bleach were a style popular among Oi! Skinheads, a subgenre of punk rock, originated in the late 1970s in England.
The lining and reverse of the waistcoat have the same X-ray print from the “Rap’sody in Blue” collection of the spring of the same year. It wasn’t uncommon for Jean Paul to borrow from past collections. In fact, the pattern gets reimagined for a Pollock-inspired denim jacket from the Gaultier Jeans line that followed some years later.
Trompe l’oeil fur pattern
An interesting trompe l’oeil long fur pattern from the women’s collection “Memories of Buried Pasts, As Time Goes By” F/W 1990/91, as well as a slightly different colourway for the men’s versdion.
