Look past the talking manikins, the feigned sadomasochistic sex acts, the hat with a video camera perched on it, the seductive virginal imagery, and the sexy, temptress fur complete with lion’s paws. The most drop-dead, stunning attraction in The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk at the Dallas Museum of Art is still Madonna. There’s an entire room dedicated to the pop star who took Marilyn Monroe’s boob-forward pin-up sex appeal, whipped in some Catholic school girl backlash, and brought the Warholian celebrity to the buttoned-down brink of the 21^st century, leaving a lot of humped chairs on stage in her wake.

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Les Vierges collection, Immaculata dress . Haute couture spring/summer 2007 (© P. Stable/Jean Paul Gaultier)

Madonna’s unmistakable presence in the celebrity shrine has everything to do with a bra. The cone bra, of course – that Barbarella-inspired, twin machine gun of fecund, nurturing destruction. The breast in geometrics, covered yet accentuated, wrapped in a corset that took cagy Victorian Puritanism and transformed it into a tank of feminist sexual power. The entire oeuvre of Jean Paul Gaultier on view in the museum exhibition comes to a tremoring climax in this piece, brilliant because it so simply and succinctly sums up the designer’s entire project. Gaultier is fixated on the semiotics of clothing, that is, how material and form carry both sensual and historical meaning, and with a little nip here, a tuck there, a swath of leather to accent, clothing can turn cultural and historical meanings on their heads.

The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier, a retrospective exhibition, is arranged thematically, not chronologically, and in doing so it emphasizes how the designer approaches this communicative power of clothing. In the room titled “Skin Deep,” we see 19^th century styles mixed with gothic blackness, leather, and sheer body suits. There are tribal-like masks, man’s mermaid pants, and a saddle latched to the back of a male manikin waiting for a leather-clad woman to mount him. It is a sadomasochistic fantasy that still retains glimpses of the elegant beauty of the naked feminine form, which is alternately sexualized and de-sexualized. But it is also all play, staged jestering, like the bourgeois strip-tease at the end of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. All whips and no blood.

First collection Women’s prêt-à-porter spring/summer 1977. 30th anniversary retrospective runway show, 2006. (© Patrice Stable/Jean Paul Gaultier)

The “Punk Cancan” room lumps a variety of styles together, crowding the gallery with a conveyer belt runway crammed with manikins and lining the gallery’s walls with more on pedestals. The animated runway show and the videos projected on the faces of the manikins, which seem to bring the plastic humanoids to life, reemphasize the necessary spectacle that must surround a show like this. In here there are Scottish kilt patterns, fishnet stockings featuring the Eifel Tower, lacy ballerina skirts paired with leather jackets, and my favorite piece in the show, the man skirt. Gaultier’s drains traditional designs of their cultural associations with simple counterintuitive pairings or bold, cross-gender assertions. But Gaultier doesn’t just undermine expectations; his puckish knavery generates styles that are ever alive and fresh.

Hommage à l'Afrique collection, La Mariée dress. Haute couture spring/summer 2005 (© P. Stable/Jean Paul Gaultier)

“Metropolis” and “Urban Jungle,” the two last rooms in the exhibition, feature Gaultier’s designs for film productions and his work in furs, and the rooms pair nicely together. The designer often pushed his costumes, for movies like The Fifth Element or The City of Lost Children, towards futuristic fantasy, while his fur creations look backwards to tribal styles. He riffs on African, Muslim, and Eskimo clothing, taking some styles that derive from economic privation and pushing them towards over-the-top glam. I love the wry cultural punning achieved by his fabric bow hats, in which Gaultier takes the very traditional Nigerian headdress, often worn by woman during weddings and moments of ritual import, and re-ties it to look like the bow on a package. If you want to make a woman a gift, Gaultier seems to be saying, tongue firmly planted in his cheek, make her a gift. Here the look is more Audrey Hepburn than Madonna, but the designer’s game is still the same. Like he did with the cone bra and the corset, Gaultier takes styles that might carry submissive connotations and diffuses them through reconfiguration, returning the styles to the culture in new, unleashed form. His clothes grant license. “You’ll do much better baby on your own,” as Madonna sang. “Express yourself.”

Image at top: Madonna in the Gaultier bra