Abstract
This study examines the esthetic characteristics in the haute couture work of Jean Paul Gaultier, who represents the fashion in France and is famous for avant-garde and experimental works through dismantling, from the first haute couture collection in 1997 to the present. The materials for the study are the precedent studies, the related literature, and the photographs of the works and the interview articles in domestic and international fashion journals. Three characteristics are revealed in his works. First of all, he provided a transcendental fashion different from the established wearing or ornamental ways by dismantling the dichotomies between male and female, time and space, and beauty and ugliness. Second, he reflected the decadent beauty recognized as representing women's sexual and provocative expression based on exposure, suppression, perversion, and grotesque manifestations by shaping an esthetic value within a different point of view. Finally, he was characterized as being transcendental with an eclectic fusion of intercultural differences or dynamics, items in costume formation, time and space, and eastern and western. This transcendental expression, Gaultier's desire for creativeness, can be an ideal characterizing this era.
