Jean Paul Gaultier Couture Spring 2020

Jean-Paul Gaultier brought down the Théâtre du Châtelet with a swansong haute couture show that was like a kaleidoscope of his 50-year career.

His all-star cast included Erin O’Connor, Coco Rocha, Jade Parfitt, Karlie Kloss, Gigi and Bella Hadid, Jourdan Dunn, Lily McMenamy, Karen Elson, Anna Cleveland, Estelle Lefébure, Noémie Lenoir, Winnie Harlow and even Farida Khelfa, his former muse and couture director.

But the biggest cheers came for Tanel Bedrossiantz, the man who has epitomized Gaultier’s brand of runway camp for decades. He did not disappoint, walking in a leather jacket with a huge rooster sprouting from one shoulder, in a section the program notes billed as “French Accent (Show Me Your Coq).”

Joining him were performers including Boy George, Dita Von Teese, Rossy de Palma, Paris Jackson, Béatrice Dalle, Fanny Ardant, Catherine Ringer, Mylène Farmer, Amanda Lear and Antoine de Caunes, who presented the cult television program “Eurotrash” with Gaultier in the Nineties.

Dotted among the audience were fellow designers Pierre Cardin, Nicolas Ghesquière, Christian Lacroix, Christian Louboutin, Dries Van Noten, Clare Waight Keller, Isabel Marant and Julie de Libran, alongside a who’s who of French entertainment.

Gaultier opened the show with the funeral scene from William Klein’s cult 1966 fashion film “Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?” The curtain lifted on a group of chic mourners striking a pose on a grand white staircase lifted straight out of a Hollywood musical, as Boy George sang the Amy Winehouse song “Back to Black.”

In typical Gaultier style, it was a mock funeral — the coffin sporting two oversize conical breasts, in a nod to the cone bra he launched in the early Eighties, famously adopted by Madonna on her “Blonde Ambition” tour in the Nineties.