Jean-Charles de Castelbajac Exhibition Celebrates a Fashion Pioneer

TOULOUSE, France – Do all roads lead to Jean-Charles de Castlebajac?

In a game of six degrees of separation, the French fashion designer could easily be connected to almost any major pop culture icon. A new exhibition highlights his Zelig-like track record of working with everyone from Andy Warhol to Lady Gaga, Robert Mapplethorpe and Pope John Paul II.

“Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, the Power of Imagination,” which opened Friday at Les Abattoirs, a contemporary art museum in the southern French city of Toulouse, is the largest retrospective to date on the 76-year-old designer.

It features close to 300 items ranging from signature designs like his teddy bear coat and Iceberg cartoon sweaters, prized by the hip-hop set, to archival documents, photos, collages, films and installations spanning a career of almost 60 years.

“We want to bring a fresh perspective to Castelbajac’s work by showing it in a new context,” said Loriane Gricourt, director of Les Abattoirs. “It also represents a shift for us as a contemporary art museum, since it’s the first time we’re presenting a fashion exhibition.”

The show aims to shed a new light on the versatile designer, who has dressed pop stars and priests in his brightly colored designs, reaching global audiences.

“Jean-Charles’ work is often known by a single dimension – usually his iconic pieces that are often featured in exhibitions, like the teddy bear coat or his signature primary color palette. But in the end, that gives us only a partial vision of a body of work that’s incredibly rich, multifaceted and ever-evolving,” Gricourt said. 

“He also brought a very singular, pioneering vision to fashion – one that has influenced many other designers, even if it hasn’t always been acknowledged,” she added.

The designer, part of a generation that revolutionized French fashion by ushering in ready-to-wear in the 1970s, has always been an outlier — a rebel who is also part of the establishment.

A contemporary of Jean Paul Gaultier, Claude Montana, Thierry Mugler and Kenzo Takada, he has been close to fellow designers such as Vivienne Westwood, punk musicians like the Sex Pistols and artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.

An Industry Trailblazer

De Castelbajac said seeing all his work under one roof allowed him to find method in his madness. 

“When Loriane told me I had carte blanche, I felt I could finally bring my archipelago into focus and see all those different disciplines I’d worked with not as separate pieces, but as one whole,” he said. “What I’ve really done all these years is to build a universe – one with its own, very precise codes.”

The show is divided into eight sections, spanning 9,685 square feet in total, with walls festooned with colorful flags – reflecting de Castelbajac’s love of medieval heraldry – and reclaimed materials, including gold foil survival blankets. 

Exhibits range from the first jacket he designed with his mother, using his old felt blanket from boarding school, to a bejeweled shoe worn by Beyoncé in the “Telephone” video and his recent collaboration with skate label Palace. 

He was the first to use upcycled materials, fashioning clothes out of mops, blankets and medical bandages starting in the late ’60s, two decades before Martin Margiela. 

De Castelbajac brought his sustainable fashion approach to his most recent gig, as artistic director of Benetton from 2018 to 2022, with creations including a waterproof cardboard trench coat. 

He set the blueprint for the crossover between fashion and art. The show features an invitation designed by Haring; photographs by Mapplethorpe and Duane Michals; a scale model of a set design by Xavier Veilhan, and dresses handpainted by Anh Duong and Ben.

In addition, he prefigured the trend of designers featuring their peers in advertising campaigns, casting Westwood, Franco Moschino and Chantal Thomass in ads for Iceberg. 

De Castelbajac recounted how he was introduced to Haring by Claude Picasso. The Pop artist had seen the designer’s teddy bear coat on Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, the German socialite known as the punk princess, and wanted to get one for Madonna’s birthday.

“There was a coat about to be shipped to Saks Fifth Avenue in the U.S., so I gave it to him, much to the horror of the person handling the shipment. He was so happy that the next day he asked, ‘Can I come paint something at your place?’ and he came over and painted these two urns,” he said, pointing to the colorful vases, which are being shown for the first time.

De Castelbajac said he initially decided to use stuffed animals as an alternative to animal fur. The coat is arguably his most famous design, worn by everyone from Diana Ross to Drake and Pharrell Williams, and reimagined in a collaboration with Vetements last year. 

Courting Controversy

He was also an early proponent of sportswear, plastering cartoon characters, pop culture figures and slogans on his clothes. “Jay-Z has the most incredible collection of my cartoon sweaters – he told me he has more than 100,” he said.

De Castelbajac recalled how he was initially sued for using Snoopy’s likeness on an Iceberg sweater without permission, but ended up becoming friends with Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schultz. 

That wasn’t the only time a design landed him in trouble. He pointed to a yellow sequined dress featuring a portrait of Barack Obama, worn by Katy Perry at the 2008 MTV Europe Music Awards.

“At the fashion show, it got a standing ovation. But two weeks later, my publicist and I received envelopes with bullet casings and threats saying, ‘You made the wrong choice – you’ll pay for it,’” he said. “That day, I understood that clothing could be political, and that it could have real consequences.”

Walking through the exhibition trailed by a pack of journalists, he whipped out a white felt tip pen to draw a Chi-Rho symbol on the palm of his hand, explaining that he used the symbol on the clerical outfits for the reopening of Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral as a kind of “Christian logo” designed to stand out on social media.

The ceremony was viewed by 1.2 billion people, he noted. “It caused quite a stir too – my multicolored outfit for the archbishop sparked a lot of commentary and endless dinner-party debates. There were plenty of supporters and just as many critics, but that’s the nature of the creative process,” he said.

That ability to remain at the center of the conversation is perhaps the key to his longevity. “I believe creation happens in stages: the idea, the design, the execution, the staging, and finally presenting it to the public and to the world. That last part is essential,” he said. 

The final room of the exhibition, dominated by a colorful mural of breakdancers, is dedicated to paying it forward. De Castelbajac hopes it will host concerts and dance performances. 

“The point of this exhibition is transmission, not in the sense of, ‘Look how beautiful or powerful my work is.’ It’s about saying: ‘Use my techniques, my approach to appropriation, my way of subverting things, and make it your own,’” he said.