Our big party (still recovering), Featureless Void, which we held at a club near the sea , in Yokosuka – was a blast – even if it almost ended in catastrophe when a pole detached itself from the ceiling and hit one of the performers (Belgium Solanas, above), who was sitting on the sidelines. Thankfully no one was hurt and the show went on. That aside, it was dreamy and expansive and a very good recharge for the love batteries – everyone said they felt really happy and at ease and I have kind of been basking in the glow in the week since.
Perfume-wise, it was interesting. Annoying in a way that people I have given so much scent to in the past didn’t bother to wear any (if not then, when ?!!! ). It was a VERY hot day as well, and some guests – having travelled in some cases more than two hours down south from the Tokyo area. would have benefited from a spritz or two of something nice; I concealed my own sweat stench with lashings of Gucci Envy For Men, which in the overly air conned space gingered forth from my person rather sexily, with lots of keenly inhaled compliments ( it was so good to be able to hug so many people after all this time ).
One friend smelled great in Electric Purple by Lalique : another in Diorissimo parfum. Belgium Solanas smelled incredible in two different cherry scents ; another smelled very ‘dressedup’ for the occasion in Coco Mademoiselle Intense – clean, silvery and ambery current, I am used to the more oystered edition that I consider one of my personal betes noires ( a relative in England gave herself two sprays of the original edt from what I think was a relatively old bottle when I was back home last summer and it was vile); on Sadnha the Intense version was much more sensual and iridescent.
Getting all the presents home the next two days was quite the joint-strainer : flowers, champagne, wine, home made gifts – one bag – we didn’t know who it was from at first- contained a luxuriantly presented bottle of Miss Dior Blooming Bouquet. Ordinarily I would probably just wrinkle my nose up at this as I stride past the department store counter ( wouldn’t you?) because I think I have just tended to lump all commercial perfumery into one category – it all just smells like duty free, that horrible, horrible, chemicalized ‘miasma’ as I often refer to it but then sometimes you realize that you are just being too overgeneralizing and swift-judgey.
I don’t know if it is only because it was from a friend, or because the special bottle the perfume comes in is rather appealing, but this 2023 new edition of Blooming Bouquet is actually very well done. Pretty, slightly melancholy, with rose and peony laced with peach and apricot nectar over the more familiar, lightly chypric dry down, I actually wore it on the grey skied second-day-after-the-come-down Tuesday morning in the silence of home and felt quite emotional.
While my basic perfume taste veers much more to the classical or artisan note centric / (the more singularly strange and beautiful, or else just effortlessly wearable), you also realize sometimes that even within the blockbusters there is evolution ; last year’s Eau Fraiche edition of Givenchy’s Irresistible, for instance, reached a pink floral loukhoum of paradigmatic perfection: similarly the red hot rouge edition of L’Interdit – so strong it was the only thing my mother could smell when she had Covid, and she likes it enough to wear to a family wedding next weekend, is so triumphantly all cylinders you want to applaud – none of the star perfumers were holding back when they set to work on that one.
And I think this is the point. I sometimes forget that the perfumers who are hired to make these blockbuster creations are artists at the very top of their game. Yes, they often have to work with banal scripts and limited budgets, and probably wish they could be more daring and adventurous, but they still always want to make something special that smells good- their professional integrity is on the line. So when Anne Flipo – author of some beautiful L’Artisan Parfumeur fragrances – and Carlos Benaim were brought in to work on an extrait edition of Saint Laurent’s popular lavender / patchouli vanilla Libre, which I smelled in a department store the other day, they presumably sat down for hours weeks and months in dialogue and experimentation – the much richer, and far more appealing – ginger and saffron emboldened orange blossom vibrating elixir (nothing new as such but still something of a sensual showstopper and much more interesting than the first version), the successful fruit of their labors. While I would myself usually prefer to be surrounded by more diffident and intriguing olfactory mystery – because I like to not understand everything, everywhere all at once (the basic message of the current popular prototypes), at the same time – as our party proved – some energized, upbeat and colourful fun is, occasionally, just what you need.
Tomorrow is our big bash in Yokosuka : all kinds of people coming- new friends, old friends (how nice it would be if some of you could also just turn up and introduce yourselves after all of these years); drag queens, pole dancers, performance art, a mix of djs, we are going all out (even though I can barely walk…)
I suppose I can at least try and smell nice though …. a question I have been meaning to put to you on here for weeks but just been too busy ….
I have considered all manner of fragrancing, from super soapy to white floral – I still haven’t told you my Tuberose Story, when I wore DSH Tubereuse with a natural tuberose oil in Shinjuku ( as Burning Bush) and had by far the most intense night of perfumed compliments ever – people stopping me on the street, screaming with joy (literally), but that doesn’t feel right for tomorrow. The forecast is cloudy / rainy / steamy. It is going to be a long day. Nothing too aldehydic/ poetic/ fragile/ tragic. But then nothing too ‘fresh’ and tedious either – I don’t want to smell like a mindless dullard.
I was going to ask for your advice but, wrong though it might be, I now THINK I am going to be wearing 60’s Shalimar edt ( just because… if it works in all the air conditioning, just some on the body, it could be gorgeous), layered with lashings of the ginger ambered sexiness of original Gucci Envy For Men. Probably too much. I may well reek. but Don’t hold it against me. I just can’t help it.
We went to Kamakura yesterday to meet a new perfume friend and I decided on Patou “1000” parfum. This was a rare decision on my part, as I usually consider ‘Mille’ more of a precious object to enjoy looking at on display than to wear – Jean Kerleo’s elegiacally elegant masterpiece is both effortless and very emotionally involving; an ingenious and deeply interwoven, rich, oily tincture of earthy sandalwood, civet, patchouli, osmanthus and violet, with other, higher green notes of rose and coriander that can feel more like ‘high jewellery’ than mere fragrance. It is quite a lot.
And yet we found ourselves broaching some quite heavy and intense personal subjects, and having this perfume just there in my background made me feel, paradoxically., rather grounded and ‘inside myself’ and yet at the same time confidently open. I enjoyed the experience immensely and wish now that I had more left.
While rather sharp and peculiar at the offset ( on the bus, someone was sneezing and d said to me blimey you smell strong… what is it ?
“Jean Patou 1000”
“It’s very vintage, extremely soapy’
I myself was rather enjoying its stark anachronism and weird, obvious beauty. There is nothing else like Patou, especially in this vintage parfum, and the dirty sandalwood/ violet osmanthus of the finish, still lingering on my shirt very keenly today, is simply sublime. 1000 is a scent that questions but doesn’t answer, leaving you somewhere in the chasm between reality and the abstraction of aesthetics. Unspoken , but expressed ; the antithesis of vulgarity.
This photo was taken last Saturday at a Vietnamese place in Yokohama : D met me after work having done posters at Kinko’s for our upcoming mega party Featureless Void in Yokosuka next week – it’s going to be mayhem I tell you, though our actual 30th anniversary is tomorrow, and fittingly, we haven’t even decided what we are going to do yet ( spur of the moment spontaneity is one of the many things that I most love about him ).
This photo is my parents at my aunt and uncle’s 63rd anniversary celebration last week. I put this in because it is entirely relevant : there is no difference whatsoever : at the top of this post you see a couple; below you see two more. They have all had their ups and downs, their highs and their lows, but something – love, presumably – has kept them together.
With the horrible, threatening-feeling rise of prejudice and homophobia that is tangible in the world right now – existential in scope – I feel that this is a point very definitely worth making.
But tomorrow it won’t really make any difference. We will be off somewhere – no idea where yet, but the weather is supposed to be lovely – just having a good time.
If we cast our minds back to the year 1899, Claude Debussy was in the process of publishing his Suite Pour Le Piano, Queen Victoria was still on the throne; Spanish rule had just ended in Cuba( Guerlain had created Dix Pétales De Roses. Houbigant first sold its Coeur De Jeannette this year, its legendary moss lavender, Fougère Royale, debuting seven years before in the year 1882. Guerlain, of course, had its famously still in production animalic herb-lavender Jicky (1889). Yet Roger Et Gallet, a French perfume house that continues to diligently produce fine quality and inexpensive fragrances somewhat under the radar, also made an enduring, classic lavender in this time period- Lavande Royale – possibly my favourite of all lavender scents, an ingenuous blend which disappeared from view for a long while and which I was delighted to find back on the market last week when I visitied the Roger Et Gallet boutique in Sogo, Yokohama.
Understated, a little brooding… refined, perhaps a tad dour… but at the same time elegant and lightheartedly refreshing, the errant tension in the lovely Lavande Royale comes from the deep contrast between a fresh bergamot/mandarin very low key, clean and crisp central lavender, and a musky, darker cedar – the key note being a hint of nutmeg in the heart which gives an inimitable kick. Theoretically, I shouldn’t go for this perfume – I don’t really wear classic fougères of the oakmoss geranium type, nor do I really wear many lavenders: I like Caron’s Pour Un Homme quite a bit but don’t love it; enjoy Jicky on d, but not on myself; I loved Jean Jacques’ lavender at Harrods – exquisite – but it was astronomically expensive. Probably the only true lavender soliflore I have ever truly gone for was the much more affordable and still missed English Lavender by Yardley, which disastrously underwent probably the most shameful reformulation of any perfume in history – see my furious piece from 2016 entitled The Cruel Desecration Of Yardley English Lavender.
That pious lavender scent, though, was only, for me, a kind of cradling refuge – a back of the hand hair shirt solace for moments of extreme noise; it could never have been an every day scent. I just don’t have an adequately grave mien (nor enough freshly starched and laundered bonnets). Lavande Royale is exactly that – a day scent – which is why I love Roger & Gallet. I love the unpretentiousness of this house; the always ready to wearness of it all. In fact, I think If I could only have one scent for the rest of time, it might actually be the company’s original Vetyver, a cologne I adore (naturally discontinued, probably because I like it ) and which is now very hard to find: if I could I would get the biggest bottles of that scent possible, and use it lavishly post shower on a regular basis : a light, nondescript (even – for most people, really quite boring) fresh citrus vetiver- again, with a palpable nutmeg core, a note I am always drawn to – nothing exciting, but that for me personally, somehow just right : I feel completely natural in it. And how often can you honestly say that about the vast majority of perfumes, even those in your own collection?
The reason I had ventured into the Roger & Gallet shop in the first place last week in my lunch break was to check if they still had my summer staple Thé Vert, a bottle of which I buy every year (even though I am not entirely sure I even like it (!) – I would never really recommend this one to anyone else – a gassy, synthetically sharp green tea/yuzu/ ginger spritz I just buy because it is the only scent I feel cuts through the sheer slimesweat of Japanese August when I just feel continually gross at work and need security (the eventual sheen of green tea that it surrounds you with is relatively pleasant and I have been complimented on it ) – but looking for that one among the new releases such as Feuille De Thé I certainly wasn’t expecting to see the name that suddenly stood before my eyes on the repackaged bottles of Lavande Royale that were newly and unexpectedly on display: my heart leapt a beat.
I hadn’t smelled this scent for thirty years or more. Filed into the ‘pleasant memories of the past’ area of my smell brain. I know I used to sometimes buy the 200ml bottles from posh pharmacies when I lived in London – it was cheap, and it always soothed me somehow (now relaunched as a ‘wellbeing’ eau, the onpointness of the name slightly irritating (the “Wellness” ‘phenomenon; …. shudder) but at least it is true; Lavande Royale was always the ultimate soft cardigan on a slightly cold and grey afternoon; a rudder in the urban eddy.
some lavender at the bus stop yesterday
I wondered : would the perfume still be the same? Or would it be a completely different scent? If not, why would they bring back a template that is not quite ‘relevant’ to the times – older than old school (I wonder what the original nineteenth century version was like?).
I had to know. And spraying Lavande Royale generously, I recognized the same signature note arrangement immediately – as you would when hugging an old friend: I was suddenly taken right back to my mid twenties. Possibly a little more concentrated, a tad harder maybe, not quite as gentle, a little too ‘fine tuned’ but in essence, the same entity. Just like hugging an old friend you haven’t seen in ages – a tender moment. I now can’t wait to go back and get a bottle, as well as some of the always pleasurable soaps.
I used to sometimes hide behind firs and conifers in the moonlight -even in our front garden – and take a long, drunken teenage piss after the pub. Picking off the needles with the other hand to crush and release the scent in the night air,there is a certain sense of liberation and intimacy for me associated with light green cones and evergreens…………..; for a few opening seconds when smelling this scent I was taken to a different, new but strangely familiar place; able to imagine the immediate revitalization of holiday on the ‘riviera’ – the light and shade; of careless time spent in the brand new environs of the great beckoning outdiors.
In Francis Kurkdijian’s first work for the house as resident perfumer, there is a lift. An immediate sense of city respite. Yet despite the energy that is present in the perfume (you don’t just throw the scent strip away but go back to smelling it at least a few more times, it has a certain life of its own), for me, I am pretty sure that a gradual lassitude would quickly creep in if I were to wear Dioriviera. In the same way that the ingenious Baccarat Rouge gets snagged on one incessant (stark and fuzzily deceptively simplistic) theme of saffron, jasmine and burnt amber; impeccable, erotic, but grating, the very fixed and linear structure of the fig/rose/coniferous ‘green’notes’ of this light getaway scent – fresh and potentially quite sexy; pared down and intricately interlocked – in truth, just have me yearning for real nature. Actual nature.
A man passed by me in the station – thirties. vaguely fashionable – and the sour, marmite -like smear of artificial oud he left on the air around him as he passed through the ticket gate, startled me out of whatever afternoon daydream I was marinating in and made me realize just how rare it is to smell this kind of base accord in Japan; that western fragrance tropes have very mercifully failed to permeate the market.
Usually, ikebana flower arrangements are very controlled. Staid, respectable, but often beautiful, even in municipal settings such as train stations.
This overpreponderance of very pungent, thrown together, yellow and white lilies I discovered near the escalators, seemed rather unruly- a plentiful offload of flowers seemingly displayed without any obvious rhyme or reason.
What fascinated me was the SMELL: sealed off behind glass, what would be deathly and nauseating inside the sweltering wooden frame was, for the casual passerby, fanned out in measured installments : a dense, long reaching muffle that descended on your consciousness almost without your realizing, like a slow, silent cacophony of trombones on mute
We were drowned in a deluge for a couple of miserable days, sodden and waterlogged. But the sun has come out again now and I am ready for big, honest blooms with no fuss.
These lovelies from SMN will do the trick. I like all three of these traditionalist, but unbound, flower colognes- all estival ease and no pretence (and in gorgeous glass-frosted bottles) : a collection tuat I discovered for the first time the other day at the Santa Maria Novella concession in Yokohama.
ROSA GARDENIA
As though you wearing a light talcum rose with a pretty top-up of Chanel Gardénia : nothing tropical or fungal plumeria, but nothing dainty or twee either : this is musky and full blown with rose de mai and almond blossom (I do like Penhaligons’ violet-tinged Gardenia also, but it is sometimes a little self-consciously clematis-cleaved English summer cottage). The unabashed Italianate romanticism is well judged here, tremulous and full, but still with the potential, certainly, to throw a bit of a wobbly.
ROSA NOVELLA
Far more sombre and solemn – a rose patchouli sunk delicately into itself as an Italian garden – for days, perhaps spent wandering the weeping angels at the foreigners’ cemetery in Testaccio, I want to try this on skin, properly, for the duration, to see where it leads me.
FRESIA
Fresia made me grin out loud. The young woman at Maria Novella smiled watching me smile. A powdery dose of pure positivity, this is not the lemony sherbet variety of keening freesias on the stem but a full bouquet guarding the entrance of the bathroom at an expensive old boutique hotel in the heart of Florence :soap, soap, and more soap (which I love). With an inherent promise of compressed floral freshness, this sudsy caprice is a beneficent delight.
A couple of days after falling and damaging my knee the other week, there came an out-of-the-blue message from a friend of a friend based in London asking whether we would like tickets to Jean Paul Gaultier’s self-penned musical stage stage extravaganza, Fashion Freak Show, up in Tokyo.
What to do?
CONS:
I had been ordered to rest and not put any weight on my leg and was in the mood to just veg out at home and recover
Going to the packed out choc a bloc heart of ‘young Tokyo’, Shibuya, a place neither of us particular enjoy any more with its tangle of manic and overenergized treeless bustle, felt kind of daunting for a suddenly immobilized codger on (an admittedly stylish and JPGesque carved wooden twizzle of a) walking stick.
We hate musicals. (Yes, you read that correctly. D even more so than me: I would rather just sit and home and stare at the wall than watch the deeply alienating spectacle of mortifying jazz hands and pearl-toothed crescendos (I realize this supposedly automatically disqualifies us from being card carrying homos : people have regarded us in sheer horror in the past when this has come up (you don’t like musicals? what the hell is wrong with you?!!!) My loathing of shopping is also grounds for eviction from gaysville: heaven is supposed to be spending the day clothes shopping on Oxford Street or Knightsbridge, a quick tipple at Harvey Nics and then catching a show on the West End, the kind of day that would have me drained yet overstuffed as a clapped out vacuum cleaner). I can do cinematic screen versions of West Side Story and The Sound Of Music, Grease and a couple of others, but no – by and large, musicals, everything about them just makes me cringe.)
PROS:
My sister, a die hard musical theatre lover, raised by Andrew Lloyd Webber-fans and devotees of Les Misérables (my parents love the musicals) had already been to see this Gaultier show twice, and with its 80’s and 90’s music and cultural references had assured me that, as it was not a musical but a hybrid of dance and circus and runway vogueing – there was a very high possibility I would love it
I had been lying around feeling sorry for myself all week in a bit of a pity party and secretly, despite my laziness and bruised pain, loved the idea of just going out and seeing something new (natural curiosity and hedonism do usually win out)
I have never been to a fashion show and have always wanted to
I kind of love Jean Paul Gaultier.
(we went …)
Quite distinct from most other designers in his personality and comic lack of pretense, JPG’s hilarious Eurotrash tv series, which he presented with Antoine De Caulnes in the strongest French accent intelligible to humanity, was quite often on in the background at our house late Friday nights during the 1990’s; he brought a unique irreverence and silliness to everything he approached, while still retaining a steadfast coolness (his fashion maison and reputation were exploding simultaneously, yet the vast majority of couturiers in this situation would be too self-serious and removed from the rest of us to deign to ever self deprecate or just make fun of everything and bring levity with his reportage on the shallower delights). Yet JPG just seemed to revel in it; I remember buying the 12″ single of his 1989 house anthem ‘How To Do That‘ when it came out
-the b-side of which was simply an engraving of his famous scissor-log etched into the vinyl; I think it is lingering somewhere in a cardboard box in my parents’ garage
and, like anybody else, it will go without saying, was completely ravaged by the costumes he designed for Madonna’s more than iconic world tour of 1990, Blond Ambition (now here I can definitely get my G membership card back).
Although the Gaultier/Madonna cone bra association can sometimes feel like lazy journalism – the couturier, who retired in 2020 after decades in the business dressing all kinds of people including other pop singers as well as film stars and a whole plethora of the rich and famous – when working for a stint at Pierre Cardin in Manila in his earlier days he also attended to the needs of one shoe-loving Imelda Marcos), there is no doubt that in the mind of the public, the enduring and automatic link you make when you think of Gaultier is between M – about to embark on a Greatest Hits world tour where she will undoubtedly unearth some remixed version of this famous look – and the lingerie-as-armour she came out on stage to for her Fritz Lang and Lolita Lempicka inspired staging of Express Yourself; a performance which at the time felt very groundbreaking and daring and ridiculously cool (needless to say, the harnesses and bras and all the expected JPG paraphernalia were also quite prominent in the show).
When the eponymous debut perfume, Jean Paul Gaultier, later renamed Classique – a sweet, madamish, and muskily authoritative orange blossom vanilla created by Jacques Cavallier (originator of such heavy breathers as Alexander Mcqueen Kingdom, Lancôme Poême, Givenchy Hot Couture, Rochas Alchimie and Cinéma by Yves Saint Laurent) was released in 1993, the ‘enfant terrible’ – another overused Gaultierism – predictably ’caused a stir’ with the stark and rude female corset that had been blatantly pillaged from Schiaparelli’s Shocking flacon and was considered ‘provocative’ stored in its metallic wooden tin. I rather liked it: an Austrian woman I was teaching at the time would wear it to great effect, but a part of me, I will admit – already had a slightly tired sense of overkill. Madonna had moved on (she was now appearing nude in the Sex book rather than wearing any clothes), and the corset felt like yesterday’s news; even the perfume itself felt strangely familiar (probably because it was modelled on the powdery perfumes that his own grandmother would have undoubtedly worn back in the day). Yet in many ways this very simplicity of concept – a neo-vintage vibe and an immaculate flacon – was the genius of this scent. The design of the bottle has certainly withstood the test of time; the word is overused, but it is genuinely iconic; and with its many flankers, Classique as a perfume is still very popular among a certain demographic who have grown up with it – the flirtatious central accord in the perfume, sexy; convincing – a bit cheap and easy in a way, but still quite erotic, and it forms one of the central pillars of the JPG perfume universe along with the indestructible Le Mâle from 1995 (Francis Kurkdijian’s inimitable salty mint lavender vanilla musk that both D and I wore back in the day) ad well as the more recent, typically floral-honey gourmand Scandal.
(other Gaultier scents, including perhaps my favourite, , Fragile, from 1999, have long since been discontinued, although there has recently been a welcome resurrection of JP2)
Gaultier’s blockbuster men’s scent LE MALE, of course, is still going very strong, still a superseller in the European market, in various differing versions I am not familiar with (the Le Parfum edition is meant to be stunning, so do let me know if you are familiar with this one or any great Gaultier flankers that have dropped beneath the radar). With an even more ingeniously designed bottle that I wish I still had in my collection, one that really did push the envelope in what a man can accept on his dressing table, this blatantly homoerotic core of the world of JPG is based, on Jean Paul’s signature dress code, that of the marinière striped, blue and white sailor’s top, as synonymous with the blond flat-cropped cropped Frenchman as the dark glasses and ultrathin black tie of Karl Lagerfeld (gently mocked in the show, along with Anna Wintour, representing the Fashion Police in a ‘comedy’ section of the show I was slightly slithering down into my seat to: as a child I was always a bit uncomfortable and squirmy during overexaggerated pantomimes….)
The rest of the show we enjoyed. With fantastically positioned seats at the front of the Theater Orb at the top of the Hikarie department store just next to Shibuya station (thanks very much, indeed, Katy!) we got the full impact of the excellent set design – all graphic neon evocations of Paris and Soho, pulsating strobes of clubland and visually striking setpieces as the beautiful troupe of dancers, models and trapezistes who formed the cast took us through the life of Jean Paul, from a little boy, surgically attaching the notorious cone bras to his teddy bear under the watchful (but approving) eye of his fashionable grandmother, Marie Garrabe (the show begins with a film of an operation taking place, before morphing into an extravaganza of giant teddy bears dancing to, naturally. Chic’s Le Freak ( Nile Rogers curated the music for the show)
We watch the young idealistic and irrepressible stripe-shirted protagonist go through his life in Paris and London, falling in love, suffering tragedy when the love of his life dies of AIDS (a movingly rendered moment with a solitary dancer performing in the dark to a poignant version of Cole Porter’s I’ve Got You Under My Skin before being lifted up into the unknown); then intrepidly beginning his own fashion business in the eighties post punk era, at first reviled by the establishment, but then finally celebrated as an untrained, but undeniably extremely talented, visionary and stylist. A series of fashion shows featuring a range of his designs prove the point; songs from the eras by the likes of Blondie, The Sex Pistols, Curtis Mayfield, Josephine Baker, Edith Piaf via Grace Jones with La Vie En Rose and of course, Madonna, as the models parade and strut their stuff on the rapidly shifting stage contraptions.
Just to nitpick: sometimes, I will admit, I was wishing for a more coutureish wow factor – in my mind, Gaultier always had an opulence to his clothes that comes through in the 2022 collection, for example, by interim designer Glenn Martens (the house will continue under seasonal leadership by different creatives)
However, it was Gaultier himself who selected the 200 or more costumes from his oeuvre for this show so one must go along with his vision. And since sensuality and a ‘cheeky infectiousness’ are JPG trademarks, it was fitting that there was just as much bare flesh on display as fashionorama. The whole was kinetic, uplifting, frenetic yet very well choreographed; a celebration of creative freedom and beauty that the audience was whooping with delight to and lapping up throughout; you left the building with an uplifted glow.
It was also fascinating, when meeting with some of the producers at the theatre bar afterwards for some drinks, to hear about how genuinely nice and funny Jean Paul Gaultier is in real life. Flying out to Tokyo to do endless rounds of interviews with the Japanese press, he apparently hadn’t complained at all, was smiling the whole time, always gracious and encouraging (if super exacting) at the costume fittings and dress rehearsals – no one had anything but good things to say about him. I loved hearing about the concert stagff being in close proximity to some of my idols – Grace Jones walking into the office and being much tinier than expected; Boy George – another protege in the nineties – as hilariously bitchy as you would have expected him to be; hearing anecdotes about how much Gaultier has truly enjoyed putting on this show about his life – which he has apparently always wanted to do since he first got inspiration seeing the Folies Bergères on the television as as a child. It was a real toe dip into the JPG universe. When the show ends its run next week or so, it will touch down in Bavaria for a while and then continue elsewhere, constantly evolving and streamlining (the two hours went very fast – I would have liked it to go on a bit longer) – entertaining the many thousands of people who have been drawn to the designer’s innate style and ethos of inclusivity which was actually mirrored in the audience (what can potentially sound like PR in this regard can be borne out by his unconventional use, over his fashion career, of models of all shapes, ages, skin colours and sizes – he was one of the first to do this, bored of conventional ‘good taste’: something I can applaud with great gusto). I like Jean Paul Gaultier’s energy. His sense of humour. I like his clothes, his perfumes, and, even if injured – the theatre staff were extraordinarily efficient in whisking me and d up in special limited access elevators and secret passage ways – it was a very fun, therapeutic and enjoyable way to spend a Sunday evening.
