After having flushed out Paris city streets and London sidewalks, Jean-Paul Gaultier continues to mix and match, showing interest in nomads, and takes the world of fashion on a fabulous journey. Into his fashion vocabulary he incorporates the long black coats of the Hassidic Jews, the Hindu sari, Nehru jackets, Mongolian reversed fur jackets and Eastern wardrobes.


Rolled up skirts, sarong pants, as long as it flows around the legs, are topped by an Eastern jacket with a Nehru flavor or an 18th century frock coat. If, to this, you add the destructurization of clothing such as jeans and shirts reassembled into a single piece of clothing via a clever set of panels, if you add an homage to Joan of Arc with an everyday coat of mail and fragments of armor from the fighting field, as well as the influence of ribald 18th century theater replete with crinolines, you end up with a wild array where travels blend with different periods, cultures, genders and tastes.


After that tattoos and body piercing start to appear. The tattoo prints made to look like promissory notes with the image of the Queen of England on T-shirts and sheath dresses in thin-as-skin knits are worn over mesh knit T-shirts. Jean-Paul Gaultier loves to spread confusion, blur the visible, the apparent, "to leave something to interpretation, to mystery. An irregular color, two superimposed drawings play with the light, to see and not see at the same time, to hide from the eyes". He uses tattoos to express two things: scarring as body decor, first clothing in the style of certain African tribes, first provocateur jewelry of the punks too. As for body piercing, his almost outrageous use of it shows a certain sexual freedom, that of one who has perfect control over it.