Gaultier and Westwood jostle fashion world in Paris

A model wears a creation by Jean-Paul Gaultier from his Spring/Summer 2007 ready-to-wear fashion collection in Paris. Picture / Reuters

PARIS - Jean-Paul Gaultier and Vivienne Westwood showed in their latest ready-to-wear collections that they have lost none of the cutting edge that has made them the enfants terribles of fashion since the punk years in the 1970s.

Gaultier, who is celebrating his 30th anniversary in fashion treated the industry's glitterati with a pre-show retrospective of some of the iconic clothes that made his fame -- Madonna's famous bustier cone, the denim sheath dress fringed with ostrich feathers, or the floor-length sailor gown.

"I like the eccentricity and the opulence," Burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese told Reuters. "Everything he does is so unique. He's continuously reinventing himself. He's had the most iconic looks in the past 30 years, not quite like anyone else."

Thirty years on, Gaultier again took the audience by surprise as he turned a catwalk into a fitness room, equipped with glittery exercise machines, sending models racing along in elaborate training suits, pumped up by songs such as Diana Ross' 1982 hit Muscles and excerpts from aerobics classes.

Wearing eyeshades and high-heeled Converse shoes, models paraded in baseball jackets in embroidered satin with shorts reading Gaultier on the buttocks as a recorded voice screamed encouragingly: "Now, we all want to have thighs of steel."

A more chic Gaultier woman wears straight or puffed-out taffetas gowns, held by a large satin belt at the bosom, in electric blue, pink or orange. Model Lily Cole wore an emerald number shortened in the front to reveal some sporty Aladdin trousers, and topped with a sleeveless baseball jacket.

In a world where appearance often takes precedence on content, Gaultier played with fashion diktats, sending on the catwalk a Botero-esque woman, a wink at the recent controversy about underweight models, another in her 50s or men with long hair and heavy make-up paired with flappers-like women.

The sight of Gaultier leaping on the catwalk with a whistle in his mouth at the end of the show even drew a smile on the stony face of Anna Wintour, editor of American Vogue magazine.

Can Barbie have a conscience?

This is the question Vivienne Westwood asked in her latest show, as the flame-haired style icon criticised the gap between the lavish universe of fashion and a poverty-plagued world.

"I designed a sort of Barbie doll in a box, with a hole in her head, totally spoilt," Westwood told Reuters backstage after her show where some models paraded out with a mane of golden hair and large belts reading "I am expensive".

"The message is 'I am expensive and I am subsidised by all the poor people in the world'. We're terribly spoilt. We have a responsibility to ourselves to do something," she said, calling again for the release of Leonard Peltier, an American Indian activist convicted for the 1975 killing of two FBI agents.

The fashion grande dame, who launched the punk look in the 1970s, clashed fabrics and designs in patched-up dresses, a classic knee-length black suit with a Stetson hat, or customised T-shirts worn to a wrapped skirt with a puffed-out behind.

One ballroom gown's bottom looked like a satin diaper or sumo fighter string and was covered up with a long trail in the back. The dress attracted appreciative whistles and cheers from a packed audience, watched by Janet Jackson and numerous buyers for Harrods, Galeries Lafayette or Japanese stores.

Some of the models were as cheeky as the fashion priestess herself, parading out with watering cans or smoking cigarettes like 1980s Westwoodian muse Sarah Stockbridge.

- REUTERS