Barbès
On March 23, 1984, at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris before an audience of over two thousand five hundred people, Jean Paul Gaultier presented “Barbès” — the Fall/Winter 1984-85 collection named after the multiethnic neighborhood of Barbès-Rochechouart in the eighteenth arrondissement — and in doing so established the template for everything that fashion would spend the next four decades learning to accept: that beauty is not singular, that the street is as legitimate a source as the atelier, that gender in clothing is a performance rather than a fact, and that the designer who looks at the world as it actually is, rather than as couture pretends it to be, will always produce clothes that are more alive than those designed in isolation from the human chaos of a city.
The collection was inspired by a woman Gaultier had observed in the Barbès neighborhood wearing a traditional wax boubou over a large tweed man’s overcoat — a combination that was not a fashion statement but a practical solution to being cold, being African, and being in Paris, and that Gaultier recognized as more interesting than anything being produced by the ateliers of the Place Vendôme. He described the collection as “inspired by an ethnic ratatouille of North African, Caribbean and Oriental cultures,” designed “for the streets and to be chic and wearable all at the same time,” and the phrase “ethnic ratatouille” — which would be unutterable in the contemporary discourse — captured something genuine about Gaultier’s method: he was not appropriating cultures so much as observing the way cultures already mixed on the sidewalks of a neighborhood where Algerian men sold mint tea next to Senegalese fabric shops next to Caribbean hair salons, and translating that lived reality into garments that the fashion establishment had no framework to evaluate.
The Cone Bra Corset Dress made its first appearance in this collection — a velvet dress ruched like an Austrian blind, with vast protruding conical breasts in a virulent shade of clementine orange, referencing the bullet bras of 1940s and 1950s Hollywood and the shell forms of Bambara sculpture. The piece would not achieve global fame until Madonna wore a version of it on her 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour — Madonna had been a Gaultier devotee since 1984, wearing his designs to the Desperately Seeking Susan premiere in 1985 — but its origin in a collection about multiculturalism rather than sexuality is significant, because it reveals that Gaultier’s interest in the body was never purely erotic but always anthropological: the cone bra was about what different cultures had done with the breast, how they had exaggerated it, concealed it, celebrated it, and weaponized it, and the garment’s power derived not from shock but from the density of its references. Tube skirts in the thinnest tweed, jersey, velvet, and gabardine crushed like an accordion around the body, and the collection’s layering — boubou over blazer, headwrap over tailored coat — proposed a mode of dressing that was simultaneously West African and Parisian, neither costume nor tribute but something new that could only have been invented by a designer who spent his days walking through Barbès with his eyes open.
The show must be understood against Paris fashion in 1984, which was dominated by Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana — designers who represented the sculptural, power-dressing wing of French fashion, producing angular, space-age garments for a new generation of women who dressed to project authority in corporate environments. Mugler, celebrating his tenth anniversary that same year, staged a show of over three hundred dresses for five thousand fans at the Zenith concert hall, turning the fashion presentation into arena spectacle. Montana was synonymous with oversized shoulders and leather-clad severity. Against this backdrop of theatrical power and architectural precision, Gaultier’s “Barbès” proposed something radically different: fashion derived not from fantasy but from observation, not from the designer’s vision of an ideal woman but from the actual women walking actual streets in a neighborhood that most Parisian couturiers would never visit.
Gaultier had placed classified advertisements in Libération seeking “atypical models” — one read: “Non-conformist designer seeks unusual models — the conventionally pretty need not apply” — and the casting for “Barbès” included tattooed men, older women, androgynous figures, and models of North African and Caribbean descent at a time when the Paris runways were almost exclusively white, young, and conventionally beautiful. This was not diversity as corporate strategy but diversity as aesthetic conviction — Gaultier believed that fashion looked better on bodies that had lived in the world rather than bodies selected for their absence of distinguishing characteristics — and the practice of street casting, which would later become an industry standard adopted by designers from Margiela to Demna, began here, at the Cirque d’Hiver, with a designer who had earned the label “enfant terrible” after putting mini-skirts and leather shorts on male models in his Spring/Summer 1980 debut and who would, by the following season, introduce skirts for men that sold three thousand units in their first year. Women’s Wear Daily gave the collection four stars and called Gaultier “the Court Jester” — a title that was meant as a compliment but that inadvertently revealed the establishment’s inability to recognize that the jester was the only one in the room telling the truth.