PARIS - Fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier loves film. For proof, look no further than his dandyesque fall-winter 2012 haute couture offering, which paid homage to the silver screen.
The 60-year-old's still evidently enthusiastic after a stint as a Cannes Film Festival jury member this year.
The show took for its muse an unlikely matinee idol: the singer Pete Doherty, who made his acting debut as a 19th-century figure in a film that was screened at the Riviera.
The movie, ''Confession of a Child of the Century,'' bowled Gaultier over. ''I said 'My god, he is so seductive, a decadent dandy,'' said the designer backstage. ''And that's my collection.''
The result, after a ready-to-wear show that received lukewarm reviews, was an androgynous and theatrical couture delight.
Nineteenth-century top hats accompanied high taffeta collars, deconstructed texture-rich satin crepe waistcoats and a lot of black.
Gaultier threw in other cinema references for good measure.
''The original idea I thought of doing Fritz Lang's Metropolis,'' he said.
As if straight out of that 1927 science-fiction film was a grey metallic looking cape with golden lining.
The shoulderless jumpsuit which completed the ensemble had the broken sheen of scrubbed metal, like the film's robot Mechanical Maria.
