The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk

Anyone who doubts the power of fashion to pull in a crowd need look no further than the Alexander McQueen retrospective “Savage Beauty,” which broke attendance records at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art earlier this year and proved such a massive hit that both its run and opening hours had to be extended.

The McQueen exhibition set a high bar. With Sunday’s opening of “The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk,” the Dallas Museum of Art will have the opportunity to see if there is similar appeal in cone bras, tattoo prints, corsets, skirts for men and other cheerfully subversive signatures of the French designer still known, at nearly 60, as l’enfant terrible.

Fashion is in the Dallas DNA — thank you, Stanley Marcus — so there’s a natural audience eager for close-up looks at artful and innovative clothes. The Gaultier show provides them in spades. The 130 garments trace his 35-year career, spanning ready-to-wear, haute couture, film and stage costumes such as Madonna’s 1990 Blonde Ambition corsets, and a recently ended stint as creative director at Hermès. Related attractions include the childhood teddy bear for which he made a cone-shaped newspaper bra, as well as Polaroids by Andy Warhol and video clips of collaborations with creatives from Pedro Almodóvar to Lady Gaga.

Sure to be a hit here, as they were at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where the show originated in June, are mannequins with digitally created, video-projected faces that sigh, wink and even sing. One is of the Puckish designer himself, who at one point exclaims, “Ah, virgins!”

Opens Nov. 13 and runs through Feb. 12 at the Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 N. Harwood St., Dallas. $20 weekends, $16 weekdays; discounts for students and seniors; free for children under 12. 214-922-1200. www.tickets.DallasMuseumofArt.org/public/.

-Tracy Achor Hayes / Guide (11/11/11)