If ever a moment should have been ripe for a Jean Paul Gaultier comeback, you’d think this was the one.
Mr. Gaultier, after all, became famous as the designer who dressed Madonna in a bullet bra, but that was just one of his many fashion revolutions.
He put men in skirts long before gender fluidity was a thing; challenged religious stereotypes; embraced all body and skin types; and believed camp and couture could, and should, coexist, scandalizing and delighting in equal measure. For him, such provocations were never a pose; they were expressions of real beliefs, backed up by cutting skills that had him compared to Yves Saint Laurent, and won him the top post at Hermès from 2003 to 2010. His clothes may have pushed buttons, but they did it with real elegance.
He created such a deep well of chic social critique that, since his retirement in 2020, a revolving cast of designers including Haider Ackermann (now of Tom Ford), Chitose Abe of Sacai and Olivier Rousteing of Balmain has been able to try their hand at a couture collection for the house, finding new inspiration in Mr. Gaultier’s old work.
So the idea that Duran Lantink, a designer with his own enfant terrible rep, would be the first official creative director of the brand since Mr. Gaultier himself, seemed like a recipe for positive disruption.
What would Mr. Lantink, the guy who showed a man in a woman’s bare breast prosthesis last season, and a woman in a man’s, do for his inaugural Gaultier collection? Put a finger to the presiding political wind — France has been rife with union strikes — go into the archive and emerge with a new bit of pointed commentary? Seize the opportunity to have Gaultier own the public conversation again?
Nope. He sent out the fashion equivalent of an unsolicited crotch shot.
Specifically a body suit with a naked male body, in all its hairy, anatomically correct detail, printed on the front. Then there were what looked like scuba suits sliced up until what was left were little football shoulder pads connected by spaghetti strings of fabric to the ankle, some leotards cut waist-high as if straight from ’80s Jazzercise, and a Breton stripe dress formed like a wire-edged S, so it resembled a portable Panton chair.
Other than a few cropped, curvaceous bomber jackets, some pants made to frame the hip bones and dip down toward the genitalia and a gold sequin coat, there weren’t many discernible clothes.
Not because Mr. Lantink was doing high-concept theorizing like Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, who this season issued show notes declaring, “I believe in the positiveness and the value that can be born from damaging perfect things” — and then found it in increasingly complex amalgamations of burlap, eyelet and lace. But because Mr. Lantink was thinking: raves!
“It’s not necessary that we think, ‘Oh, there’s a concept behind the curving thing,’” he said backstage after the show. “At the end of the day, I think what’s really important in the process is that we try to be really playful. Jean Paul Gaultier is all about nudity and sexuality and provocation.” But provocation for provocation’s sake is just puerile.
Whether fashion can even be transgressive any more is a real question. In a world where norms have been trampled and guardrails for communication dissolved, where what were once the edges have become the mainstream, “edgy” itself has become a kind of hackneyed idea.
You could see it in the first, generally lackluster, Maison Margiela ready-to-wear collection from Glenn Martens — another designer whose guest stint at Gaultier led to a terrific collection. Mr. Martens, who had an equally triumphant Margiela couture collection back in July, this time sent out his models with their lips stretched wide in a rictus grin created by mouth guards.
Though they were meant to mimic the brand’s four-stitch logo, instead they resembled torture devices. And though they were a reference to the founder Martin Margiela’s desire to erase the person, so viewers focused on the clothes, they instead served the opposite purpose, distracting from the experiments Mr. Martens was creating: transforming collars and lapels so they either disappeared or became decorative; using duct tape to reshape a gown.
Meanwhile, skin has been everywhere: sportif at Hermès, in bra tops with leather pencil skirts; womanly at Givenchy, in more bra tops paired with sarong-like skirts or beneath mesh dresses with exploding ruffles at the top. At this point it seems less like a trespass and more like a shrug. When even Rick Owens, the dark lord of fashion, collaborates with a bra maker and the result just looks kind of sweet, you know there’s been a shift in the atmosphere.
The body parts that have been the most visible are the belly button and the bottom. At Alexander McQueen, Seán McGirr revived the bumster and, again at Gaultier, Mr. Lantink embraced the thong.
But whereas once that might have been the final frontier of propriety and crossing it an implicit, and explicit, statement of insurrection — against the establishment, society, old ways of seeing — now it seemed like a halfhearted ploy for attention. A reflection of the fact that when everything is exposed, exposure itself becomes less and less consequential.
And the most shocking thing of all when it comes to fashion may be simply making great clothes.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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