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Gaultier's modern pirates according to Ludovic de Saint Sernin
Le Naufrage, the first Haute Couture show of the young French designer
January 30th, 2025
The protagonists of the Haute Couture show by Jean Paul Gaultier, designed by Ludovic de Saint Sernin, are a band of travelers lost at sea. With Le Naufrage, French for “shipwreck,” the designer presents his very first haute couture collection as the temporary creative director of the brand founded by the enfant terrible of fashion in the 1980s. Saint Sernin is the eighth designer to take on the role since 2020, when the fashion house announced that it would continue to produce shows without Gaultier but with the support of a series of guest designers selected by him. Over four years, renowned industry names such as Haider Ackermann, Olivier Rousteing, Glenn Martens, Chitose Abe, Julien Dossena, Simone Rocha, and Nicolas di Felice have debuted on the brand’s runway. With 34-year-old Ludovic de Saint Sernin, Gaultier chooses to put the new generation of designers to the test. Despite Le Naufrage, it seems that Saint Sernin has managed to bring the ship safely to port.
Regarding the French fashion house’s collaboration with various creatives invited to reinterpret the brand’s imagery, there are no rules—after all, we are talking about Jean Paul Gaultier. However, Ludovic de Saint Sernin is a designer known for a rather dark aesthetic, with designs full of sex appeal but lacking humor or ambiguity. For this reason, despite Gaultier’s work also extensively celebrating the female body, the collaboration raised doubts about Saint Sernin’s ability to not take himself too seriously. Gaultier’s shows have long been spectacles rather than mere fashion shows, collections that left the fashion industry audience both breathless and deeply entertained. Between a corset, a Cupid in briefs and golden wings, a cape dress in sheer organza, and a theatrical finale in which de Saint Sernin himself walked the runway in a total black bodysuit and heels, the young designer of the new fashion guard managed to elicit a few smiles from the audience.
The inspiration behind Le Naufrage comes from an old Gaultier collection, a 1992 look that included a ship-shaped hat. From there, de Saint Sernin delved into the designer’s obsession with sailors and pirates (to whom he dedicated shows, perfumes, and entire collections) and immersed himself in an aesthetic exploration of everything that happens beneath the hull of a ship. De Saint Sernin’s couture featured mermaid skirts adorned with seafoam-green sequin waves, brown mesh corsets that mimicked Gaultier’s conical bra as well as shipwreck debris, references to mythology and other stories, and even a sailing ship-shaped headpiece worthy of Isabella Blow. Nudity and sheer fabrics were still present but left enough room for irony, visible even in looks made of what appeared to be gray crocodile leather, perfectly form-fitting to the models’ bodies but featuring playful jagged hems.
Although some looks were quite distant from Gaultier’s aesthetic—despite the presence of corsets and lacing, some characters were drawn from Saint Sernin’s own archive—the show succeeded in its intent and entertained the audience. Capri pants in lace, laminated black brocade, and silk recalled the collections Gaultier designed for Hermès in the early 2000s, as did the corset blazers and sandal boots featuring front cutouts. In the final looks, the most minimal yet also the most seductive, it was as if de Saint Sernin wanted to use every trick he knew: he combined taffeta draping, more corsets, ostrich feather skirts, and a black and brown lace anchor-shaped top that covered only the nipples and navel. In any case, whether it’s the Ariel look (a heavy tulle dress tied with twelve meters of rope) or the Venus look (a mermaid dress crafted from draped strips of dark cotton), we know that at least a couple of these outfits will be chosen by a celebrity for an upcoming red carpet.