Shayne Oliver Freaks Jean Paul Gaultier’s Corporate Codes

Fashion impresario Shayne Oliver puts his spin on the JPG legacy with hip pads, bumster jeans, T-shirt gowns, and more. It’s for the office—or anywhere.

“Jean Paul Gaultier made garments about the wearer—the wearer is the diva.”

For his interpretation of Jean Paul Gaultier’s work in a just-launched capsule collection, Shayne Oliver continues that mission. His pieces, while inspired by the brand’s couture archive, aren’t the fusty, precious pieces one might associate with a Parisian maison—rather they are simple, flexible garments for a contemporary life on the go.

“I loved how Margiela”—Gaultier’s onetime design assistant—“took a lot of the showmanship that Gaultier had, but then he made it for everyday and had a wearability context,” says Oliver. “I’m not trying to be Margiela, but I liked this attitude of wearability.”Here, Oliver has drawn on Gaultier’s infamous corsetry and redone the silhouette in appliquéd mesh with foam hip pads attached at the sides. (“There was a little bit of a running joke at the time too, where we were like, damn, everyone is getting rid of their BBLs. It would be so funny if we made it easier for them to do that,” Oliver adds.) He also interpreted Gaultier’s strict tailoring in denim and leather, with ultra low-rise trousers and cropped trucker jackets, and turned a T-shirt into a twisted seam gown inspired by JPG’s bias-cut dresses. “I feel like this kind of movement, it's so simple,” Oliver says, pointing to the ease with which he hopes people wear these garments.His personal connection to JPG goes back to his teenage years, trawling Upper East and Upper West Side thrift shops with Telfar Clemens. “I met Telfar when I was 16 and by the time we were 21 we had ravaged through all these stores,” Oliver says, laughing. “We were just obsessed.“Being able to buy and wear the clothes made Gaultier so realistic to me, too. I can identify with him in a weird way because these secondhand places helped make his really high ideas super relatable,” he continues, citing the mutability of Gaultier’s work as a longtime influence on his collections. “A lot of those garments were very interchangeable—they always had two purposes or were designed to be worn two different ways. That was something that was very inspiring for me to see through these found items.”As for his collection? The SSENSE party for its launch proved there are multiple ways to wear a mesh hip pad dress. Tag us in your best fits.