Lights, Camera, Gaultier! The Australian Centre for the Moving Image together with L'Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival present a film program dedicated to the career, creations and influences of the ‘enfant terrible’ of French fashion – Jean Paul Gaultier.

2010 marks forty years since Gaultier started his career in fashion at an after school job assisting designer Pierre Cardin and he is now not only one of the most infamous fashion designers but also one of the most revered Paris couturiers – rare for a self taught designer. Gaultier and his designs are also interweaved throughout the history of popular culture - his Madonna’s Blonde Ambition-era cone bras, the controversial skirts for men collection, as well as his stints as a presenter on cult UK TV show Eurotrash - all confirmed him as a style icon. His designs have also been praised by a galaxy of starlets from Mickey Rourke to Marion Cotillard.

With Jean Paul Gaultier on Film ACMI Film Programmer James Nolen has compiled a program that charts the course of Gaultier’s career from his early inspirations to his most recent creations.

The season opens with The Day Before: Jean Paul Gaultier (2009) which portrays the final hours before the Gaultier Haute Couture fashion show. Director Loic Prigent, a self-confessed fashion geek – who has previously followed Karl Lagerfeld and Marc Jacobs – now spends 36 hours with Gaultier on the eve of his 2010 Autumn-Winter Haute Couture collection.

As well as being inspired by film, Gaultier has himself been responsible for some significant on-screen moments including costume’s for Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Dystopian French steam-punk feast The City of Lost Children (1995). The City of Lost Children and its dark disturbing world, inhabited by a little orphan girl, a sentimental strongman and dream-stealing mad scientist, was the first film to fully explore the vision of Gaultier.

Thurs 11 Mar –
Fri 19 Mar
Screening: Federation Square, Melbourne