Jean-Charles de Castelbajac has brought his pop-poetic sensibility to three decades of witty, super-colorful, and very sculptural clothes. In the punk-influenced ’70s he introduced dresses printed with handwritten poetry, a shirt made from traditional French dishrags, and a jacket made from Castelbajac’s boarding school blanket. During the ’80s, he turned towards pop, producing an astonishing teddy bear coat, an inflatable rain parka which could double as a life preserver, and dresses silk-screened with portraits of the Mona Lisa and Jackie O. The ’90s saw Castelbajac moving inwards, with a dress made from fluttering Cholet handkerchiefs, a multi-fingered sweater made of white woolen gloves, and an Atkinson Blanket jacket with a hood that zipped closed to conceal the face entirely. For the new century, Castelbajac has produced what may be his dreamiest and most seductive work ever, calling on fairy tales, autobiography, joy, and fantasy.
On a recent trip to Paris, we stopped to visit with Jean-Charles. He greeted us in classic Levi’s and an old pink sweater with a cigarette burn in the shoulder, and showed us around his sky-lit Gustave Eiffel studio. Throughout the afternoon, smoking a string of Dunhills, Castelbajac talked to us about Malcolm McLaren, his first couture collection, and how he came to dress both Farrah Fawcett Majors and the Pope.

Peter: I think of you as one of the real prodigies. Exactly how old were you when you started?
Jean-Charles: Seventeen.

Cory: Where did it come from?
Jean-Charles: Rebellion. Because I was sent to boarding school when I was five, first in Normandy, then in Betharam — in Basque country, a very tough place. No girls, no color. We all wore dark blue. My mind was really not ready for that. And when I came out at sixteen, I didn’t want to be an officer or a lawyer or a farmer. I wanted to be an artist, but I had no idea what kind. On my mother’s side there were a lot of artists. One was a famous chef who cooked for Napoleon III; another was a great architect, the right hand of Le Corbusier. But on my father’s side, it was a thousand years of men who were born to wear a helmet — although my father was kind of a romantic. But I couldn’t stay in the country with my family.

Peter: So you went to Paris.
Jean-Charles: Yes. And fortunately I arrived in Paris two months before May ’68. I was in a little room, trying to live on 100 francs a month ... May ’68 was a crucial moment, very nice, very burning, very enjoyable. I realized that I was not alone — being upset with my family, upset with institutions. At l’Odeon I saw Martial Raysse and Alain Jacquet, and all these painters making posters — things like DeGaulle as Hitler ... it was just fatal. And suddenly I knew what it was to be an artist.

Peter: So this whole idea of collage and unexpected juxtapositions, which is still central to your work, came out of that moment?
Jean-Charles: Everything in my work is bizarrely accidental. Now I know how to prop up those accidents. But they always guide me. I like the accidental relationships between the past and today, and between people on the street.

Peter: When I saw your new dress with fur in the showroom, I began to think about Surrealism ... and maybe Schiaparelli?
Jean-Charles: Yeah, yeah. Schiaparelli is the big inspiration for my couture. With Schiaparelli, there was a celebration of intelligence. It was even a definition of surrealistic intelligence. When I came to Paris, my only points of reference were uniforms and work clothes. The rest was really bullshit. But I was knocked out by two things. First, by Coco Chanel’s approach. I found that in Chanel you had this sense of work clothes, of a new uniform. And then from America I was fascinated with L.L.Bean. So my cult things were Chanel and L.L.Bean.

Peter: I know that you met Malcolm McLaren early in your career ...
Jean-Charles: He’s been my friend for thirty years now. I discovered his store, Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die, at the same time I was becoming popular for designing clothes from blankets and high-tech material.

Peter: What year was this?
Jean-Charles: I would say ’71. Malcolm’s store was on Kings Road. They were selling t-shirts with the word “Rock” written in chicken bones and I really loved that because I was doing clothes using bondage. I was so out of the trend. I was feeling very lonely. So to find that somebody was thinking like me ... I’d never met him, but then he came to visit me with a rock band called The New York Dolls, and we had a lot of fun. I dressed David Johansen for their concert at the Olympia. It was a difficult job — like dressing the Pope. David wanted to be on stage as if he were Maurice Chevalier and Mao Tse-tung. It was very difficult to bring that together. But I finally found a solution — to make the inside of his tuxedo red with a picture of Lenin. It was a fun time. Malcolm later came back to Paris with the Sex Pistols, and he introduced me to Jamie Reid, who was my favorite graphic designer.

Peter: I see that you have a sculpture by Tom Sachs.
Jean-Charles: I like Tom. I like the subversive attitude. When I met him here in Paris, he had done these very scary guillotines. And guillotines in my family have a really bad reputation. [laughter] We were totally chased out by the revolution. My ancestor, the Marquis de Castelbajac, had to live in Spain to avoid being guillotined. So this is the first guillotine I find interesting. Tom did a t-shirt for me recently with a picture of a gun. It says “Kill All Artists.” Some of the people who came into the store were scandalized — how could I dress the Pope and sell such a terrible shirt?

Cory: You really dressed the Pope?
Jean-Charles: Yeah. I was the only designer who ever made clothes for the Pope. It was two years ago, when he came to Paris. The Bishop of Paris approached me to make all the garments for the Pope, 500 bishops, and 5,000 priests. And I said yes, immediately. They were expecting two million young people at this celebration.
Peter: So that’s why they asked you, in order to make it relevant.
Jean-Charles: I came up with this idea of the rainbow because the priests were coming from five continents. So I thought, five colors coming together as a rainbow for the Pope. What I didn’t know was that it was also the flag for gay people.

Cory: Right. You haven’t been to Chelsea lately.
Jean-Charles: Different groups started to call the Vatican to complain. But the Bishop said, “God created the rainbow and no one has a copyright on it.” So they accepted my project, and that’s how I was able to dress the Pope.

Cory: You went straight to the top.
Jean-Charles: Yeah. That was my first haute couture outfit. [laughs] The press said that I went from Charlie’s Angels to the Pope because I had dressed Farrah Fawcett for three years.

Peter: You did?
Jean-Charles: Yeah. But just her.

Cory: Farrah was the best Charlie’s Angel.
Jean-Charles: She was the best. And she was very sweet. I think it was in ’74. A man named Jay Bernstin called me, but I wouldn’t take his call because I would only speak to people I knew. And he called and called. So finally, I talked to him and he said, “Jean-Charles, I’m here at the American Vogue studio, and we’re shooting one of your garments on Farrah Fawcett Majors. I’m the producer.” And I said, “Who is Farrah Fawcett Majors?” You know, I don’t know. And he said, “She would love you to dress her for the series.” So I agreed to meet them here in Paris, and when I arrived in front of the Hotel Georges V, it was like the Beatles. It was really a riot.

Cory: This is right when she was on that famous poster?
Jean-Charles: Yeah, with the big smile. At the time I was very skinny, and I wore a black leather jacket or something like that. So I knocked on the door, and suddenly it was the Six Million Dollar Man opening the door. [laughs] And he obviously didn’t expect someone who looked like me to be a fashion designer. Anyway, I ended up working on the whole series.

Peter: Everybody’s trying to do things like Charlie’s Angels now.
Jean-Charles: That was a crucial time for women’s liberation. In Charlie’s Angels, the girls did the fighting; they were free, they were action girls. I started to put pockets into the pants, and used jersey fabric to make jumpsuits that were sexy and sporty. I wanted to create an image of the triumph of the new American woman.

Peter: I’m tempted to say that your fall collection is more sculptural than ever before.
Jean-Charles: Yes. This is the big step in my work today. Because I’ve always loved very sculptural forms, but I wanted to make them wearable. And, by the way, some people have a tendency to display my clothes on the wall, and I don’t like that.

Cory: Actually put them on the wall?
Jean-Charles: Yes. Like my teddy bear coat, which was an accumulation of teddy bears. Or the first down jacket I did in ’73 with transparent plastic and feathers in color.

Peter: One of the things I find so interesting is all the quilting in the fall collection. The curving shapes are sewn into the fabric.
Jean-Charles: I love everything related to the hand. As Plato said: “Man is intelligent because he has a hand.” Now I’m also using an iron to actually burn the material.

Peter: On the white piece it’s so beautiful.
Jean-Charles: I’m working with rust too. I soak some of the material in rust, and it becomes oxidized. I’m interested in the effects of time. I don’t like new clothes. I usually get my jackets in Saville Row. Then I have my tailor send them to a man in the country who wears them for three months. So when they come back to me I get jackets that are already cool.

Peter: There’s so much color in your work, and I never thought about the obvious French artist — Matisse.
Jean-Charles: Oh, yes. When I started the project for the Pope, my assistants brought in Byzantine embroidery and Renaissance images. I was totally in shock, because I didn’t want to do anything elaborate. I wanted to get to the essence, to a notion of simplicity and humility. Simple color was a fantastic connection between a young generation and an old institution. Throughout my life, I’ve used colors from flags ...

Peter: I know you collect them.
Jean-Charles: For thirty years now!

Peter: So it’s color as a sign that’s important to you?
Jean-Charles: Well, I’m not using color in the same way as before. People would say something was “very Castelbajac” because it was red, yellow, blue. Now I use all kinds of color. There are no rules about color — even for someone like my friend Ettore Sottsass. I interviewed him recently and asked, “When was the first time color was important for you,” and he said, “The day I saw the blood of my father in the snow.” In my case, I was totally starved for color in boarding school. It was totally prohibited.

Cory: And do you think that in your new work you’re moving a little bit away from color towards texture?
Jean-Charles: Yes. Definitely. Three years ago, I went through an introspective moment when I was wondering — what do I want to do with my life? I don’t want to be a legend in fashion. I don’t want to be a prisoner of my history or be put in a museum. I wanted to go on. So I did a collection that was all white. It was called First Aid, Premiers Secours. I didn’t present it as a big show, but as a lab, and I explained my clothes. And it was as if I was starting again. Because people who are twenty don’t know the things I did in the beginning. They don’t care much about the origin of things. One of the most interesting phenomena today is karaoke. Who cares about authenticity? This is very modern.

Cory: Do you do karaoke? Or do you just like the idea?
Jean-Charles: Through my work, yes. Because I’m doing a karaoke of my ideas now. It’s like I reinterpret my creativity. I did four shows. There was First Aid. And then a winter collection, just before the war in Kosovo, called State of Emergency. I invaded the Paris metro with 150 models. Then, last summer, I did Paradisiac, with models in a supermarket. It was about nostalgia for the icons of modernity — the blender, the vacuum cleaner. The most recent show, Supranatural, was all about nature, because I feel there’s more regress than progress today. So it was a political statement.

Cory: It’s funny, the new little hats with the still lives on them — they look like bonsai trees, the ultimate control of nature.
Jean-Charles: That’s why the title of the collection was Supranatural. I want to reconstitute a perfect little world, like you have around an electric train set. Now I’m the art director of Galeries Lafayette for Christmas, and I’m doing the hugest electric train ever — 18 kilometers.

Peter: That’s 12 miles long!
Jean-Charles: Yes.

Cory: I also love the bear claws you’re using as epaulettes.
Jean-Charles: Yeah. They make the dresses very sexy.

Peter: And then the sweater with the deer on the front, with real glass eyes. It’s amazing. But it’s not really nature. It’s a kind of child’s nature.
Jean-Charles: I call it post-innocence. You know, Cervantes said: “Always keep in your hand the hand of the child you were.” It’s from Don Quixote. This was my motto and it’s still my motto. When I was a kid, I had to live like an adolescent. When I was an adolescent, I had to be an adult. And now that I’m an adult, I think I’m living the youth that I never really lived. I’m having fun, like with my castle in the Pyrenees. It looks like a toy, or a kid’s drawing, with its two huge towers. Now I’m looking for a llama to put there, and I’d love for Peter to do a fresco.

Peter: You know, when I mentioned to Luigi Maramotti, who now runs MaxMara, that I was going to interview you, he told me the story about how his father Achille met you ...
Jean-Charles: I was seventeen.

Peter: He said that you didn’t want to be paid — except in art.
Jean-Charles: Yes. But they had to find me first, and it took six months. They left messages in all the hotels. I had no home. I was staying in a hotel with a gang of rock ‘n’ roll people, and I was selling my sketchbook for like, 20 francs. I got this message: “Call back MaxMara.” I said, “What is MaxMara?” I went to meet Achille in Italy, and I was in shock when I saw his art collection. At the time I’d only bought a few lithographs by Alain Jacquet ...

Peter: So you were really involved with pop art?
Jean-Charles: Yeah, I was shocked by the intensity of color in Warhol, and I liked French pop, like the neon color in Raysse. And then I saw this collection — there was a Manzoni, some work by Kounellis, and Mario Merz. MaxMara wanted me to design for them, and I said, “I just want to be paid in art.” And Achille said, “Okay.” He was fascinated by that because usually everybody wants a lot of money. He’s one of the greatest men I’ve ever met.

Peter: This is Achille Maramotti.
Jean-Charles: Yes. And you have to remember that this was a dangerous time in Italy with all the terrorism. Many of the men I was working for were under threat of being kidnapped or having their children kidnapped. When I arrived at the train station in Reggio Emilia, I saw a mannequin of Dr. Maramotti that had been hung with a sign on it: Maramotti ... primo sur la lista.

Peter: First on the list.
Jean-Charles: There were always bodyguards around. You cannot imagine ... it was like a movie.

Cory: And this was when your art collecting began.
Jean-Charles: Yes, the first works I got were by Giulio Paolini and Claudio Parmiggiani. Then I went to Rome and met the critic and art dealer Mario Diacono, who was a great friend of Achille, and he introduced me to the Transavantguardia movement. This was in ’79. I soon began to work with artists — mostly photographers like Robert Mapplethorpe and Duane Michaels — to do the invitations for my shows. Then there was the Keith Haring invitation, which turned out to be his last drawing. I was in the plane coming back from Tokyo, and I saw in the paper that Keith was dead. When I arrived at my office, there was a roll on my desk, and it was his last sketch.

Peter: Your career begins in ’68, which was an enormous moment of change, and within ten years you were established. But the early ’80s really also meant something in terms of change — especially in Europe.
Jean-Charles: Yes. The early ’80s were still fun actually. I had fun back then. I hated the ’90s. So I love that we’re in this new century.

Peter: You have the new book of your work here. I’m wondering if we could look at some photos of something early, like from the early ’70s ...
Jean-Charles: [opening the book] These are actually the first clothes I did, which were made with the rags you use to clean the floor.

Cory: Oh my god.
Jean-Charles: It was a romantic time. Everybody was doing anarchic art with all this stuff ...

Peter: We’ve been following all the new people doing fashion downtown, and your ideas are so relevant to them.
Jean-Charles: It’s amazing. I’ve never raced against time. But now all the new generation, they strangely consider me as a godfather or something. It’s kind of nice. Because I think I can help too. In the ’70s, nobody would invest in luxury or fashion. But in the ’90s, it was all money over fashion. This kind of power has also killed identity. In Paris, for example, fashion is now done mostly by Americans. We have this new notion of the “designer mercenary.” You know, a mercenary is a soldier you pay to go to war for you. Designers today work under the big shadow of the company’s wings and have to adapt to their identity.

Cory: That’s why we love all the young designers working in Nolita and on the Lower East Side.
Jean-Charles: The most successful designer of tomorrow will be the guy who’s working like a situationist. The only way to fight this money power is to become a resistance. If I were a young designer today, I would go to a show of Dior with ten girls dressed in my clothes and just invade the stage and do my show. On their stage! That’s what I find exciting. That is the meaning of being young. So in this sense I feel totally young today.

Peter: There is still the traditional question, which I ask even though I know you aren’t so traditional, about the relationship between your work and dressing women.
Jean-Charles: [whistles] This is key. Because I had this strange idea about women when I started as a designer. The image of woman was the figure of my mother. And my mother was so tough. My father was more feminine, more romantic, more free. But my mother was one of those women who wanted to conquer the century. So the first feminine image I had was not very sexy. In fact I’ve spent my professional life doing a kind of psychotherapy through my work.

Peter: Oh, that’s really interesting.
Jean-Charles: When I was suffering, I was taking poems by Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and printing them on my dresses. And when I was deeply happy and nostalgic about childhood, I did teddy bear coats. I’ve always used fashion in this way, but mainly it was my quest to understand women.

Peter: And what about the surrealism in your fall collection? Is that pure happiness?
Jean-Charles: I think it is. Surrealism is also related to serenity. You create your own little island, your own world. In this sense, Lewis Carroll was the father of surrealism.

Peter: So he’s someone you’re thinking about now?
Jean-Charles: Yeah. It’s all about opening different doors, like Alice.
Cory: I loved how in one of your bear coats the fur seemed kind of sticky ... like it was a real bear.
Jean-Charles: That was the idea. I was looking at photographs of bears in Alaska, going in and out of the water. I got the idea to treat the coats with the gel that I use for my own hair, and we combed the coats before the show. Couture is my field of experimentation, and I like to take it in different directions. My idea about couture is not to cover something with embroidery like a Christmas tree — it’s how to manipulate the material until I find a truth.

Peter: Now I don’t really understand the difference between your prêt-à-porter ...
Jean-Charles: Me neither!

Cory: But technically this fall is the first time you’re doing couture?
Jean-Charles: It is. Although I feel as if I’ve been doing couture for a long time, in fact. Because I always work with hand-weaving and hand-painting. I was never satisfied by the pure material from the manufacturer.

Peter: So as a gesture, what does your couture collection mean?
Jean-Charles: For the last three years I have worked to make my clothes accessible to the public, and more affordable. For example, I have had to find new, less expensive printing techniques. But many of my ideas can only be realized in couture, so this notion of couture is more about experimentation. It’s like super-dreamland.

Peter: I can imagine.
Jean-Charles: I’m producing my dream, which is fine. I’m not even planning to sell my couture. I know I want to have thirty-five or forty looks, which will be like little novels. In couture I like to take a material and think about how I’m going to occupy it, how I’m going to embroider it, burn it, or cut it out. And then there is the doublure, or lining, which is a very intimate connection between me and the woman who is going to wear the jacket. I’m going to write a poem into the doublure, poetry that nobody else will read but her.

Cory: I know that you’ve always looked at America, but you never went to live there?
Jean-Charles: My fascination was really with the American sense of cool. You know, when I started in Paris I went and knocked on the door of Raymond Loewy’s studio. He was working in Paris at the time. I said to him, “Listen, I’m seventeen and I don’t know how to draw.” And he said, “What do you know how to do?” “I know how to sharpen a pencil.” So he said, “Okay, we need a man to do that.” [laughter] I stayed in his studio for three weeks. It was great. This guy was multi-talented. He designed the button-down collar and the Studebaker. He designed for the Apollo space program.

Peter: He did?
Jean-Charles: Yes. All the Apollo shapes ...

Peter: I never knew that.
Jean-Charles: The spacesuit of the astronaut John Glenn — that was Loewy.

Peter: I know he did the plates and silverware for the Concorde.
Jean-Charles: Yes, he did that. He did the logos for Exxon and Lucky Strike ... and the button-down collar.

Because he hated to have his collar loose. [laughter]
Cory: And how did Loewy’s work influence you?
Jean-Charles: You know, design should be about a good human feeling. Sometimes when you’re designing a chair you forget that, because culture today is largely based on function. And you should never surrender to function. But American functionality was one of my biggest fascinations.

Cory: Yankee ingenuity.
Jean-Charles: Yes. Like the duck shoe from L.L.Bean. It’s a cult shoe. But then the new Yankee ingenuity at the end of the ’70s became so scary ... like the SWAT team. [laughter] I almost died at Kennedy Airport because of this ingenuity. The only time there was a bomb at Kennedy Airport, I was there. I was in transit from Rio and I had no visa. So two policemen were assigned to take care of me. I went into a washroom and there was a guy with a box, and he was really sweating. And I thought, “Am I really seeing this or is it the jet lag?” It was like a bad film. The guy was sweating all over this box. So I went back out and I said, “Listen, officer, there’s a very strange man with this very strange box, wearing an orange t-shirt, sweating in there.” The cop said, “Everybody’s strange in New York.” We started walking away — I was with Yohji Yamamoto, imagine that — and in the custody of those two policemen, and suddenly there was a huge explosion.

Cory: Oh my god. Like, two minutes later?
Jean-Charles: Ten seconds later. But that’s my life. I’m coming from Rio. I’ve just done a fashion show. I’m going to Tokyo, just passing through New York. I have no visa ... and BANG, the next thing I know I’m being blown five meters down this hallway with two policemen. And they yelled at me as if I had put the bomb in the washroom. Later, I was outside — I’d never had so many interviews in America! [laughter] NBC, ABC ... and then the FBI and the CIA. I was really the star of the day. Suddenly three black trucks arrived, and a SWAT team with machine guns ran by. I thought I was hallucinating. Then, at the end of the parking lot, I saw Ellen Saltzman from Saks — and I will remember this my whole life — she just walked up to me and said, “Oh, Jean-Charles, how nice to see you. How are you doing?” [laughter]