JP Gaultier's fall/winter 2010-11 Prêt-à-Porter collection of embroidered patterns on skirts, hoodies and jackets is up at Colette - a collection the concept store describes as one "dédiée à la France métissée. Afrique, Mongolie, Chine, Mexique, ses influences sont multiples et mixées à son propre style." Which doesn't say much - fashion likes to find its origins in concepts by simplifying them - but does demonstrate that this year's crew of interns, while forgetting to include Peruvians to their list of bearers of colourful patterns and being particularly out-of-date with what is multiculturalism, struck up an interesting point, not so much on contemporary French identity, as on contemporary French (and more broadly western) material culture.
I just finished an intensive 18 hour embroidery stage in the last of Paris' embroidering ateliers: Atelier Lesage - an all female crew of 70 pattern makers, designers and embroiders headed by one man (François Lesage, the owner) who spend hours crocheying and needling beads, threads and precious jewels unto haute-couture creations. The last atelier of a French tradition that now is done in countries with cheaper labour - 101 econ: this is called offshoaring.
Back at Colette, with my newly acquired knowledge of point de Boulogne and point de graine, it was clear that Gaultier's prêt-à porter hadn't, indeed, gone through these brodeuses' hands - with the inside full of small industrial white strings. It's hard to blame JP in today's economic structure (the hoddie's already selling for 1561 bucks), but with the chances of the hoodie coming straight from China - just like it's so-called conceptual roots - it's a perfect artefact of our Western contemporary material culture's base: a métissage of concepts, sure, maybe, but especially a métissage of producers, makers and consumers. And not even a métissage really but more an international chain of production/consumption that goes mostly one way.
I still love it. But that's because I'm French, and as Gaultier has demonstrated the French are all about métissage.
