Jean Paul Gaultier has added a talent to its guest designer programme, tapping Shayne Oliver — the co-founder of Hood By Air who left the design collective last year — to design a ready-to-wear capsule for the Paris-based brand.
In a collection of around 50 items seen by BoF featuring distressed, gauzy overlays, bumster silhouettes, ultra-wide-leg denim and the logos of imagined streetwear labels like “GLTR Sportswear,” Oliver turns an eye informed by New York counterculture to the gothic romance, extreme drama and lighthearted kitsch present in Gaultier’s archive.
Gaultier plans to launch the collection in New York on May 6 — the same night as the Met Gala — throwing an after-hours party for the project on American fashion’s biggest night.
Oliver says he drew inspiration from the way Gaultier shook up the fashion establishment in the 1990s by putting casual staples like denim on the couture catwalk. The era mirrors his own approach to fashion: his previous work at Hood By Air transformed foundational elements of American street style like T-shirts and durags, exaggerating and twisting them to create a bracing blend of social commentary and runway couture.
“I didn’t want the collection to be about swag-ifying something high brow. It felt more organic for me to critique the things I find important in the modern wardrobe, and amplify that,” Oliver said in an interview by phone. “There was a lot of common ground there.”
The collection about “utilitarianism, femininity, power and play” is designed to be worn “from couture to the bedroom floor,” Oliver said.
The provocative, yet wearable line could help revive awareness for Gaultier’s more elevated ready-to-wear propositions after years in which the most visible elements of the brand were either its theatrical haute couture looks, or at the other end of the spectrum, sailor-striped T-shirts and perfumes that generate the majority of sales.
Jean Paul Gaultier suspended its ready-to-wear operations in 2014, and the designer stepped back from designing his house’s haute couture shows in 2020. Since then, the brand (owned by Spanish perfume giant Puig) has leaned on a guest designer programme that’s featured Sacai’s Chitose Abe, Y/Project’s Glenn Martens, Simone Rocha, Haider Ackermann and Olivier Rousteing to create haute couture collections for the house.
The brand has also quietly built back up its presence in ready-to-wear with a mix of accessible capsules inspired by its haute couture outings, reissued archival looks and collaborations with brands like London-based KNWLS.
Owner Puig, whose net revenues reached €4.3 billion last year, recently confirmed plans to raise €2.5 billion in an initial public offering in the Spanish stock exchange. The deal will allow its founding family to retain the “vast majority” of voting rights, the company has said.
