About Jean Paul Gaultier

Jean Paul Gaultier is a renowned French fashion designer whose career spanned four decades. He is best known for his iconoclastic collections which challenged societal norms and celebrated androgyny, blended street styles with haute couture, and juxtaposed other seemingly contradictory cultural symbols.

Gaultier began his ascent within the fashion world when he set up his own shop in 1982. He created a men’s collection in 1984, and two years later he opened his first boutique in Paris. In 1990 he published his largely pictorial autobiography, À nous deux la mode (“Fashion, Here We Come”), and in 1993 he expanded his product line to include perfumes—marketed in distinctive corset-shaped bottles—and accessories. It was the 1997 showing of his first haute couture collection, however, that secured his place in the fashion industry. With support from the Hermès fashion house in Paris, he subsequently opened boutiques in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and in 2003 he became Hermès’s official designer, a position he held until 2011.