At a time when America is so preoccupied by carbohydrate intake, leave it to the French to conjure an exhibition focused on... bread and fashion? Dubbed “Pain Couture,” (High Fashion Bread), this summer’s show at the Fondation Cartier features fun follies based on a creative collaboration between Jean Paul Gaultier and the French Bakers Guild.

It’s an unexpected marriage of two crafts: the baker who mixes, kneads and manipulates flour, water, salt and leaven into fanciful shapes and the designer who drafts, drapes, snips and sews fabrics to create crisp stylistic silhouettes. In keeping with the spirit of a couture house, France’s finest artisan bakers have picked several emblematic pieces from Gaultier’s past collections and transformed them into some of the most scrumptious garments in town.

In a room where the visitor is intoxicated by the smell of freshly baked bread, there are bustle dresses on wicker basket forms assembled with baguettes, country loaves and sour dough bread. Using special molds, the bakers have produced shoes, hats, boots, an umbrella... and even a Kelly bag and kilt. Mannequins and busts are everywhere, suspended between rows of "wicker" shades, against the Foundation's two-story plate glass windows, resting on a stretch of craft wrapping paper, or perched atop pedestals. Particularly striking are a floor-length evening harlequin skirt made of shortbread cookies linked at the corners that swirls around the hips, trailing back two meters, and a couple of shift dresses made of graduated langues de chat (super-fine butter cookies) wired together in layers.

In an article published in Beaux Arts Magazine — titled “In Bread with Gaultier” — JPG discusses his approach to fashion with Mathias Ohrel. “I don’t consider myself to be an artist. I see my work as that of a craftsman, like bakers and confectioners... Bread, of course, is a basic foodstuff, but it also appeals to me as matter. It is made by human hands.”

If anything, this is the weak point of the show. The distinctly “capricious” nature of the bread baking process has us wondering what this thematic display will look like in its final weeks! Still, on that score, the Foundation appears to have cooked up a plan... The exhibits will be able to evolve or change thanks to a fashion/baking lab installed in the room downstairs. Bon appetit!!!