Editor’s word: As a part of Vogue Runway’s ongoing efforts to doc the historical past of style exhibits, we’re closing out 2025 by including newly digitized exhibits to the location. This fall 1991 ready-to-wear assortment was introduced in Paris on the Cirque d’Hiver on March 15, 1991.
At Jean Paul Gaultier’s fall 1991 presentation, greater than 125 seems to be had been proven over the course of about an hour. The Cirque d’Hiver house was fitted with gaudy blue velvet curtains, and fashions walked inside a blue circus ring painted with yellow stars on a floor slick sufficient for ice-skating. As if that weren’t sufficient, for the finale, can-can dancers descended from both aspect of the curtain, swinging their frothy skirts and kicking their legs excessive up into the air. Plus c’est plus.
Equal to this calculated chaos had been the clothes themselves. The through-line was Gaultier’s transposition of components of the Eighteen Nineties to the Nineteen Nineties. The primary mannequin out was a lifeless ringer for both Yvette Guilbert or Jane Avril. Each had been well-known French fin de siècle cabaret performers and favourite topics of painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; the previous sang, the latter danced.
Dressing, like performing, is a type of self-transformation. All all through his profession, Gaultier took that concept farther than most, making garments that could possibly be worn a couple of approach. Right here, one among his fundamental preoccupations was rectangular or sq. sample slicing. Left unfastened, the material draped and created handkerchief hems. Within the case of whittle-waisted jackets, the ends had been folded up and buttoned on the backside middle of the again, creating a reasonably quantity.
Wildly coloured tights accessorized lots of the seems to be. Pants typically had aspect stripes on the inside and outer aspect seams, which created an phantasm of narrowness. Sweet-cane stripes and trim waistcoats appeared impressed by what weight lifters, barkers, and ringmasters wore in old-timey circuses.
Skaters, ice skates, and skating-like costumes underlined the winter theme, which was additionally emphasised by faux-fur trim on the wrist, hem, or throat. There’s a picture of Toulouse-Lautrec carrying Avril’s feather boa that might have been on a temper board for this assortment; a extra up to date studying calls to thoughts Cruella de Vil.
Among the many sub-themes was an activewear motif; see the hooded anoraks and smooth leggings. Gaultier additionally indulged his fervent Anglomania. Items with handprints on them learn as Lascaux–meets–Vivienne Westwood’s Nostalgia of Mud. A mannequin with a face-obscuring head-to-toe bodysuit appeared to pay homage to Leigh Bowery.
Based on up to date reviews, the present was delayed an hour as a result of door crashers. Those that made it previous the bouncers had been greeted, wrote Reuters, by dancers who “gave out sweets and bouquets of violets on the door, whereas a barroom singer crooned previous French ballads.” For Gaultier, life has at all times been a cabaret.