Gaultier à-Go-Go

SPOTLIGHT

Paris designer Jean Paul Gaultier says he can't sing, but that hasn't stopped the naughtiest of Europe's fashion enfants tembles from cutting a single and making a new, trendy-as-hell video called "House Couture" to go with it.

The wacky couturier's self-avowed "tolerance" for natural human protrusions has always given the fashion press plenty to twitter about—cone breasts, patentleather crotches, "diapered" bottoms, "deavaged" hips— and his recent fall collection, goofing on the AC/DC SteinToklas look of the twenties, had front-row sitters diving ostentatiously into their pockets for Kleenex.

Always game for a collaboration, the brilliantly iconoclastic designer has just finished the costumes for Peter Greenaway's new film, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. But it was Gaultier's elegant leap from catwalk to vinyl that really ruffled the feathers of tunnel-visioned editrices. To everyone's surprise (mostly his), the record is a hit in Europe, and his signature Tintin hairdo and perpetually arched eyebrow are already as much a staple on France's equivalent of MTV as the beauty spot on one pop star's face and the stubble on another's. The 45 spoofs a television interview Gaultier gave on the topic of How to Create Something New Every Season. Bored with the old designer-dilemma cliche ("It is impossible to create a totally new look.. .a jacket must always have two arms," he once snapped), Gaultier had the interview chopped to pieces, remixed—not unlike his own leetle-beet-of-ziss-leetle-beetof-zat approach to fashion—and set to an acidy "House" beat for maximum dance-floor appeal. With the help of image maestro Jean Baptiste Mondino, the Fantasia-like video tells a story of atelier angst: a thimble-fingered, pencil-chomping Gaultier and his fave posse of models weave through a chorus line of animated scissors, lipsynching to Gaultier's speeded-up refrain, "How to do zat... in a deefrent way."

CHRISTA D'SOUZA