Jean Paul Gaultier Spring 2018 Couture.....Fashionweekly..On Fow24news.com

Usually catching a whiff of the 1960s pre-show is enough to have your eyes rolling into the back of your head, as if you’ve taken one too many downers.......
Yet, given the politically challenging moment we live in and the terrific orchestrated responses we’re seeing to it, mirroring that decade’s affirmative (and combative) actions on gender, race, and sexual politics, it might have been timely.

In the end, it wasn’t the ’60s that Gaultier explored through his couture, which is a pity because this is a designer who’s pushed a few political buttons in his time. In fact, the referencing of the decade was a bit of a bait and switch. In the end, it provided a twist, a few times explicit, more usually barely perceptible, to Gaultier’s familiar haute couture tropes—the smoking, the trench, the Hollywood siren evening dress. The opening look—curvy Op Art tunic over a miniskirt, one leg clad in black hose, the other in white—might have been Peggy Moffitt redux, but it was all over in the blink of a false eyelashed eye. The preponderance of black and white—highlighted with a few outfits in Day-Glo colors—was used for looks that were more akin to Chachki’s ensemble, with ’40s jackets in molded black leather or rose gold silk. There was fringe galore, too—there’s been so much swish and swing these past few days—on some very bright dresses. But it looked best when the fringe, all 1,500 meters of it, was suspended from the sleeves of a perfect double-breasted tux and strung all over the matching trousers.