Ludovic de Saint Sernin is too young to know “Gilligan’s Island,” the American sitcom that stretched a shipwreck storyline with only seven castaways into three very silly seasons.
As this season’s guest couturier at Jean Paul Gaultier, de Saint Sernin spun his own fantasy tale of maritime disaster, but with a boatload of characters far more interesting and sensual than the professor and Mary Ann.
“The idea was to create a story that would inspire people and make them dream about couture,” he said during a preview in the atelier. “There’s elegance, there’s luxury, there’s lust – all of the emotions that you can think about on a shipwreck.”
On Wednesday night, mermaids, pirates, sailors, sea monsters, and a “forever bride” spilled out onto the catwalk at Jean Paul Gaultier headquarters on the Rue Saint Martin, each of their sexy outfits given a cheeky name in the run-of-show text, a house tradition stretching back to the founder’s glory days.
You can easily see where the DNA of de Saint Sernin and Gaultier sync up – corset lacing, theatrical eroticism, body diversity, and an anything-goes approach to sexuality and gender.
For the most part, de Saint Sernin let Gaultier’s tailoring legacy sink along with the ship, and focused on nearly naked, body-skimming dresses with a variety of surface textures, evoking fish netting, seaweed or black sand clinging to wet flesh, a wink to a favorite Herb Ritts photo of Cindy Crawford rolling on a beach.
The show could have used more variety, but it held your attention with visual jokes: a barely-there gown fronted with only an anchor for modesty, and a Madonna-esque corset with spoked ship wheels in lieu of cone-shaped bra cups.
De Saint Sernin marveled at the capabilities of the seamstresses, and their willingness to “come up with new ways of expressing couture and have fun with it.”
For example, he tasked them to approximate crocodile hides with latex, which they accomplished with uncanny accuracy for a slinky sea-monster tailcoat and gown.
He also put a new spin on Gaultier’s signature “morphing” technique: On a fishtail gown fit for a Celtic princess, dense crystal beading in a tartan pattern yielded to black ostrich feathers drenched in glycerine.
“It’s such an incredible luxury to be able to do couture and and the atelier is so generous, so gentle, so knowledgeable, and the relationship that we built is so precious. I’m going to miss them a lot,” said de Saint Sernin, who shimmied out for his bow and made a beeline for Gaultier, embracing him like a rescuer.
