A visit to a dance studio invariably conjures images of ballet buns, leg warmers and the kind of perfect posture that most of us will never achieve. Dance Attic Studios in west London on a Monday morning in early summer doesn’t disappoint. Dancers cluster outside smoking and chatting, wearing a mix of sportswear and crop tops. Inside, they practically float between the different studio spaces.
The main studio is a particular hive of activity, thanks to rehearsals for Fashion Freak Show, the musical revue based on the life of the former fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier, opening at the Roundhouse in Camden Town, north London, this month. Choreographer Marion Motin, wearing a Manchester United tracksuit top, mismatched trackies and an in-the-zone expression, is walking a group of dancers through a scene in the show. Taking place in a reconstructed version of Le Palace – a nightclub often called the Studio 54 of Paris – it features music by Prince, Chic, Grace Jones, Divine and (slightly anachronistically) Amy Winehouse. If the dancers at first seem gangly and out of sync with each other, after less than half an hour, they’re looking good on the dancefloor. A man on rollerblades, with a tray of plastic cocktails, only adds to the mood.
Gaultier is looking on quietly, periodically calling dancers over to discuss hairstyles and costumes. Dressed in a dark chambray denim shirt and jeans, accessorised with a full-fat Coke and rimless glasses, he is different from the Breton-wearing enfant terrible depicted by Pierre et Gilles in 1990, or the kilt-wearing cheeky chappie presenter of Channel 4’s Eurotrash. But, it soon transpires, only a bit. He still employs classic French phrases including “Ooh, la, la!” and enjoys making slightly outrageous statements. “London is sex,” he says at one point, with an irrepressible wink.
Fashion Freak Show, first performed at the Folies Bergère in 2019, starts with Gaultier as a schoolboy designing cabaret outfits for his teddy bears and runs through that disco moment, the Aids crisis and collaborations with Madonna, Kylie Minogue and Pedro Almodóvar. Along with live action on stage, his famous friends – including Rossy de Palma and Catherine Deneuve – appear in video clips.
Gaultier retired from mainstream fashion in 2020 after 50 years in the industry. “I said: ‘Fifty years in fashion is good, now I use my passion for something else,’” he tells me during a break in rehearsals. Moving to theatre wasn’t too much of an adjustment. “I knew [the story] because it was my life,” he says. “I couldn’t write but I could tell [the story] by tableau.” He worked with the director Tonie Marshall, who died in March 2020, to flesh out the tableaux to a fully fledged production.
He says the show is “not the conclusion [of my career] but a full circle moment” and argues this is the project he’s been working on for his entire life. “It goes to the origin when I was nine,” he says. “I saw the footage [of Folies Bergère dancers] on TV and I said: ‘Oh, I should like to make scenes like that.’ The day after, I went to school and I sketched [the dancers] during class. One of the teachers made me stand up and she put my drawing on my back. She wanted to make me ashamed but everybody came [up to me]. I was not good at football – ‘We don’t want Gaultier’ – but with the sketches all the boys were smiling at me, so I was integrated.”
Fashion Freak Show – as the name suggests – is full of fashion moments. It includes a lifesize version of Nana, Gaultier’s teddy bear, and her corset outfit that went on to inspire the famous conical bra that Madonna wore on her Blonde Ambition tour in 1990. There’s also a scene with a fashion editor who looks very much like Vogue’s Anna Wintour.
A huge room in the rehearsal studio houses the 150 costumes used in the show, ranging from brightly coloured feathered contraptions to clothes from Gaultier’s archive, including couture denim pieces with crystals and a leather jacket from his first collection in 1976. Each member of the cast has between six and 10 costume changes per show. Motin worked on the production when it was in Paris, and has worked on stage productions for Madonna and Christine and the Queens. Speaking on the phone a few days after the rehearsal, she says the costumes are a part of what makes the show special. “It’s a complete show with dance, video, music, singing, acting. It’s quite different. It’s not a musical revue, it’s a hybrid – like Jean Paul.”
Gaultier spent time in London from the 1970s onwards – it is his experience in sex clubs at the time that led to that earlier pronouncement about the city – and feels at home in the UK capital. “In London, I feel more freedom,” he says. He remembers seeing the play of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at Kings Road theatre. “I saw the poster, a black face with red lips and blood. I said: ‘Wow, we have to see that.’” He says Rocky Horror influenced him “a lot”, and the maximalism and abandon of Fashion Freak Show – down to its strapline “Strap in, hold tight and enjoy the ride” – has the feel of the now classic musical.
Fanny Coindet, assistant director for the show, performed in the 2019 production of Fashion Freak Show. Over a very dancer-friendly lunch of superfood salad, she says working with Gaultier has shown her how important it is to evolve. “He always questions everything and always wants to take the show somewhere else,” she says. “The show never sits in a place and that’s how I feel that the show can live.” Coindet admits, with a smile, that part of her job is thinking: What would Jean Paul do? “It’s about how you try to project the way he thinks. If I was him what would I say? I’m always wrong!” Still, the duo form a tight unit – discussing costumes and casting to finesse the show for its new audience.
Among the costume changes, the story is integral to Fashion Freak Show. “It’s about the life of someone who has really lived all sort of things,” says Motin. It takes in rejection – Gaultier was initially dismissed in France fashion because he didn’t attend fashion school, instead taking a job at Pierre Cardin at 18 – life as an LGBTQ+ person in 70s France, and a love story between Gaultier and his partner Francis Menuge. The couple met in 1975, and Menuge was central to the designer launching his own label. Menuge died in 1990 from Aids-related complications. This is part of Fashion Freak Show, too, with a scene dedicated to protected sex. In the Paris production, condoms were thrown into the audience.
“[I didn’t include him] to make him live again but to make him [part of the story],” Gaultier says. “I started to do my collection in my name because of him … He gave me [that] as a possibility. Not financially at all because we were poor, but psychologically … He was even younger than me but he was clever to make me feel confident.”
Gaultier says his experiences as a young gay person meant he was “attracted to people that were different … I remember a girl at school with a red afro and skin so pale you could see the veins. She was fabulous because she was different. Different sorts of cleverness always attract me as well, that’s sort of theme.” It is one that continues in Fashion Freak Show. The cast is diverse across ethnicities and body shapes – a striking decision with dancers traditionally seen as only size zero and white. “That’s what it should be because we don’t need everybody to look the same, because that’s life,” says Motin “and this is inspired by life.” Gaultier is still not totally satisfied, however. “One is still missing,” pointing to older people. “It is the last taboo, that wrinkles are not nice.”
Coindet says this inclusivity, something long part of Gaultier’s universe, particularly chimes with what audiences want now: “Everyone [came to see the show in Paris], from weird kids to his established fanbase. I think it’s very multigenerational … For many people, he opened doors and freed some minds.” With dancing teddy bears, a diverse cast, strong story and a disco soundtrack, London’s Fashion Freak Show will probably free a few more.
• Fashion Freak Show is at the Roundhouse, London, to 28 August.
