On corsets, sailor stripes and Jean-Paul Gaultier's "fetichic": Classique and Le Mâle

Much has been made of the fact that the bottle of Jean-Paul Gaultier’s first feminine fragrance was modeled after Shocking’s dressmaker-dummy bottle, designed by Leonor Fini for Elsa Schiaparelli. But by the time the fragrance was launched in 1993, the peach corset had long become a motif in Jean-Paul Gaultier’s collections, where it first appeared in 1984, and a part of international pop culture as Madonna’s costume in her 1990 “Blonde Ambition World Tour”. More than a motif, it was JPG’s founding gesture as a fashion designer, since he famously made his very first garment as a child, a bra for his teddy bear, after studying his grandmother’s undergarment.

A pure product of the mid-70s sea-change that saw fashion become quotational, Gaultier, along with Vivienne Westwood, pioneered what I’ve dubbed “fetichic”: a hijacking of the sexy lingerie rejected by women in the 60s, ironically re-appropriated by the punk-era enfants terribles of fashion. The corset quickly became a self-referential element of Gaultier’s arsenal, just like the blue-and-white striped sailor jersey which would inspire the bottle of Le Mâle – the latter is literally the emblem of the couturier who is seldom seen without it. Before the post-diet Karl Lagerfeld even donned his first Hedi Slimane slim suit, Gaultier had invented the “couturier as logo” look.

The appropriation of the peach corset and marinière as emblems is also a typically postmodern gesture in that they were already sartorial emblems. The corset stood for hyperbolic femininity with overtly erotic connotations: by the time JPG started using the motif, old-style lingerie, no longer a part of a woman’s daily wardrobe as it was at the time of his grandmother, was used solely in sexual contexts. The marinière, as part of the French sailors’ uniform, stood for virility – what’s manlier than a sailor? – with homoerotic connotations. Together, they symbolized the mythical whore-and-sailor couple the ads have frequently played on.

Thus, when Beauté Prestige International, Shiseido’s arm for fragrance licenses, created the Jean-Paul Gaultier brand, there was no need to look back to Schiaparelli to think up the corset-shaped bottle. Unlike some of its competitors, BPI, who owns the Issey Miyaké, JPG, Narciso Rodriguez and Elie Saab perfume licenses, has consistently built up brands that translate the designers’ aesthetics.  Of course, from its inception in 1990 up to 2000, it was helmed by the formidable Chantal Roos who was part of the team that launched Opium, the first truly global perfume blockbuster, a textbook example of consistency between brand identity, story, visuals and juice. Roos achieved a similar success with BPI’s first launch in 1992, Issey Miyaké’s L’Eau d’Issey. Though not all of BPI’s launches have been successful (Le Feu d’Issey was a notorious flop; A Scent by Issey Miyaké and Narciso Rodriguez Essence, despite two of the best bottle designs of the decade, weren’t blockbusters), still, they managed to walk off with six French Fifi Awards over the past 20 years. In 2012, BPI swept the top six prizes for JPG Kokorico and Elie Saab Le Parfum, but also the award for the best feminine fragrance in 20 years for Christine Nagel and Francis Kurkdjian’s Narciso Rodriguez for Her.

JPG Classique and Le Mâle both won Best Fragrance when they were launched (the public also voted with their skins and wallets, consistently placing them in the top ten bestsellers in France). But more than that, both fragrances can be considered contemporary classics in that they have stamped our olfactory culture and memory, not only by creating clones in fine fragrance, but by seeping into functional products.

What’s particularly interesting is that both Classique and Le Mâle started out with deliberate references, not only to functional products, but to the very archetypes of gendered functional products. Le Mâle, a fougère, is Francis Kurkdjian’s interpretation of the barbershop, every bit as much of an ironic/nostalgic quote as the marinière that inspired the bottle. As for Classique, just like the corset, it is a reminiscence of Jean-Paul Gaultier’s grand-maman, and possibly the first fragrance to deliberately reference cosmetics, namely rice powder and nail polish remover (Sophia Grojsman’s Trésor for Lancôme had pioneered the “cosmetic” note but had not set out to do so intentionally).

Just like its cosmetic-table referents – and, for that matter, the corset itself – Jacques Cavallier’s Classique smells unapologetically of artifice and boosts femininity to drag-queen levels. The orange blossom note carries a whiff of baby aspirin; the face powder accord, backed by a powerful vanilla fond, gives off the brittle, almost gustatory effect of a meringue; the powdery texture is reprised in the slightly dusty smell of woody accord. The “corset-peach” tone is achieved through the peachy lactonic notes of the white floral accord.

Like Gaultier’s corset, which he submits to variations in each collection, Classique has given birth to a whole family of flankers. This year’s “Urban Jungle” edition is dressed up in the jungle motif of the spring/summer 2011 women’s RTW collection starring Beth Ditto and a posse of Ziggy Stardust-Siouxsie Sioux punkettes, but also inspired by the quirky “jungle in the house” suite Gaultier designed for Elle Déco. 

The juice is the same as last year’s Classique d’Été, with a boosted rose and an old-school hairspray effect I’m not sure is an improvement on the nail polish remover note. It feels just about as natural as the magenta palm fronds on the bottle, which isn’t necessarily an issue with Classique – with its distinctive tin-can box, it has never pretended for a minute to be anything but a tongue-in-cheek, postmodern reading of the floriental genre.

As you can see from the bottles below, the bottles have shed their trademark stripes and corset to don camouflage fit for a psychedelic jungle: the sailor and the tart have turned into Adam and Eve.

---