Gaultier

Seven has been on holiday this week. For the first half she was off skiing with her dad and brother which was quite delightful for me as I stayed at home, but on Thursday and Friday she and I spent the days together which was very pleasant for the most part, bar a couple of quite spectacular teenage tantrums (erm, thought I’d be spared this for at least a few years, but apparently not).

Yesterday we went to the De Young Museum to see the Jean Paul Gaultier exhibition which was rather wonderful. I was not sure what Seven would make of this – she is somewhat resistant to gallery visits on the grounds that it is boring to go and just look at things if you can’t actually play with them or, better yet, buy them and take them home (I see her point), but I did manage to pique her interest with the story of how I came to acquire my very own Gaultier dress back in the naughty nineties and after that she agreed to accompany me.

Back in those days I was at the height of my singing career and was dating a boy from NYC who worked as a music exec. We had quite a torrid romance, meeting in various cities around the world when our schedules allowed, and now I look back on it, it all seems rather predictable and obvious that as the artist in the relationship I was completely caught up in the drama and romance of what was actually quite an improbable and impractical relationship, whereas he, being a) a bloke and, b) a music biz tosser,  was much more interested in the status and the bling of it. Anyway, he was the type of person to hang out in the absolute most coolest bars and hang with the hippest people on the planet (how else would he have met my good self, of course?)  and it was on such an occasion in New York that he met Jean Paul Gaultier in some  hotel bar and got chatting with him, and in the course of that told him about me. Apparently, they got on so well, and JPG was so taken with whatever my lover had said about me,  my career, my bod, whatever, that he went off and came back with a dress sample for me which I have to this day. I wore it once or twice but only on private occasions, as it is, ahem, completely see-through, and even though I did at that time have the bod to rock it, I could never quite bring myself to go out in public showing my knickers and bra to the world at large.
Still, I was impressed. I took my lover’s acquisition of this dress, fool that I was, of a sign of devotion, of love, of an indication of promise that never really came through.

We broke up some time later for reasons that weren’t very concrete but were fairly obvious nonetheless.

Seven loved the exhibition, she wandered around critiquing the clothes, saying which she would wear, which she thought were ‘too weird’, laughed openly at footage of Madonna walking down the catwalk with a dog in a baby carriage and asked loudly

“Is that Lady Gaga’s mom?”

causing great mirth all around.

I had a lovely time with my little girl and thought wistfully of the time back in the 90’s,when JPG, his favourite models, and I were all in our heyday. It seems quite a long time ago now, the glamour so distant and hard to fathom

Years later I met that guy again. There was no sign of the boy he had been in the smooth and not entirely likeable man he had become. He claimed to have forgotten all about the dress.

I wondered to myself if he really had  met JPG or if he’d gone out and bought the dress and then made up the story later. Then I realised that either way, in this case, it really was the thought that counted.

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