Two months ago José Criales-Unzueta reached out to me with a few questions for a piece he was writing on fashion’s current fascination with breasts (you can read his article here). As I wrote to him, Daniel Roseberry’s current work for Schiaparelli has a direct antecedent in the designs of several male designers in the late 1960s-70s who created armored breast plates that morphed models into warrior goddesses. While the gold breastplate Claude Lalanne made for Yves Saint Laurent (from a mold of Veruschka’s breasts) is the most well-known, I wanted to share a bit more about the work and life of the sculptor and set designer Oskar Gustin, a longtime collaborator of Emanuel Ungaro.
Details of Oskar Gustin’s early life are difficult to find. Born in Switzerland in 1934, Gustin moved to Paris in 1953 and began working as a costume jeweler. Noted for the beauty of his work and his perfectionism, the famous theater director Antoine Bourseiller asked Gustin to do the scenery, costume and jewellery design for his restaging of “Rodogune” in 1960. Set in ancient times, the 17th-century tragedy revolves around the murderous machinations of Cleopatra, queen of Syria—an epoch that provided Gustin ample space to show off the excellency of his jewels (thick cuffs, sculpted belts and intricately worked neckpieces) thus drawing him instant acclaim.
Now working with Boursellier on all of his stage productions, Gustin’s set designs built on his skills as a metalworker—often sculpting whole environments out of soldered copper or other metals. For Bourseiller’s restaging of Molière’s “Don Juan” at the Comédie-Française in 1967, sheets of copper formed the backdrop while large copper abstract forks and other shapes broke up the downstage. The scenery was revolutionary—a review in Le Monde proclaimed, “To each his own vision of Molière's vision. [Bourseiller’s] is of a flamboyant baroque style. It strikes the room like lightning, it tears it apart, it lights it up, it blossoms in sprays of sparks and falls back in a shower of ash. Its arms are azure and gold; they have the shine of leather and copper: the blue leather of the costumes, from sky blue to steel blue; brass decorations, all the bumpy, regrowth, hammered brass, enclosing the action in a pale or glowing vice, a circle of flames sometimes drawing enormous waves, sometimes strange trees, sometimes high paneled ceilings.”1 This revival of “Don Juan” later opened in New York in 1970, with the New York Times praising the “hard-edged, haunting mood” that Gustin’s sculptural environments evoked.2
Intrigued by Gustin’s sets, Ungaro sought him out in 1967. For the Spring-Summer 1968 collection, Ungaro asked him to make a series of metal masks “to liberate” the models—“to make them feel more safe and less shy.”3 The use of metal on the runway was not completely new—Paco Rabanne premiered “the Armor Look,” using aluminum discs and triangles, a few months earlier in July 1967—but Gustin’s masks were a more organic departure from Rabanne’s graphic shapes. According to Ungaro, “When you see people for the first time you tend to label them without knowing what they really are. These masks represent the ‘inner face’ of a person—once you know her, know what is going on in her mind. It’s the whole problem of human communication—the masks force people to understand that one must learn to really look; they incite the search for what is beyond the first impression.”4 Abstract, avant-garde forms sculpted from brass, copper and aluminum, the masks remade the wearer’s face into an almost alien form. Vogue photographed them on Penelope Tree and Twiggy—their famous eyes staring out from inhuman, sparkling visages.
Gustin and Ungaro’s collaboration expanded for Fall-Winter 1968-69. While the majority of the collection was composed of Ungaro’s impeccably tailored—and highly coveted—coats, suits and dresses, Oskar created free-form matte aluminum pieces to close the show. Paraded down the runway by sleek models, the metal forms were truly sculptures for the body—“a harnessed bandeau of supplest metal plus an undulating metal belt” paired with transparent white pants embroidered with 3-D daisies, while Ungaro’s bride wore “the most sensational little bandeau and mini-jupe—and thrown on the surprise of a short white circle of cape, all giddy with curlicues of St. Gall embroidery.”5
With normal metals not normally suited for producing clothing, Oskar experimented with creating new ones. To produce the bras, belts and skirts for Fall-Winter 1968, Gustin developed a special metal alloy that could be pressed smooth and flat in order to bend and mould to the body. Once perfected, he looked into developing metals that more easily blended with woven textiles; he confided, “We are working on new metals, new patinas because the difficulty is to mix metal and fabrics. Some fabrics get that brilliance that matches metal perfectly, but some like cotton don’t have it. I am doing chemical research. With metal on skin there is no problem."6
The next year Gustin began adding jewels to the metal, creating highly ornamented surfaces redolent of past civilizations. Ungaro’s nod to the counterculture movement, one of the most extravagant pieces was a bare-breasted look with a brass mini-skirt appearing to hang from a sculpted peace sign articulated over the abdomen. The bride wore a teeny metal bikini bottom with a metal cage overtop, “as people wear barrels, loaded with live zinnias, daises and baby breath.”7 While showpieces like these were worn to best advantage by models (including Marisa Berenson in the pages of Vogue), socialites of all ages responded to Gustin’s metallic fantasies. One fashion column relayed how, “When São Schlumberger opened her coat in the directors’ room with its boiserie walls she was wearing Ungaro’s gauzy, see-through white T-shirt with a pair of breast pockets made of polished brass. Mrs. Schlumberger has kept the vow she made to herself at a New York party last year to give up wearing ‘square clothes’”; then went on to divulge how, “Everybody laughed when Ungaro showed bronze bras and a metal wedding dress in his last Paris collection, but there were half a dozen of his metal-trimmed costumes at the track last weekend. Estée Lauder…was wearing one of the suits with a brass turtleneck collar…”8
Based on a love of art and a passion for good quality, the two men developed a close working relationship and friendship. Gustin revealed in 1969, “I am not especially interested in fashion, but I am interested, like Ungaro, in the spirit of fashion. Women must have an intelligent body that gives life to what they wear. I think that more and more people don’t part the body and the soul.”9 They both came to the work from this interest in the body and the joy of creation, with Ungaro providing Gustin the space to participate in fashion from his own more artistic viewpoint while Oskar also brought Emanuel into his own world—Ungaro designed the costumes for a play, “Vincent et l’amid des personnalités,” that premiered in Paris in 1969 with sets by Gustin.10 Ungaro said of their collaboration, “To use pieces of art in my collection is not so important, but more important for me is to work with people who are in the same state of mind…people who have the same attitude toward life to produce the same things… [Gustin and other collaborators] are people who create life. That’s more than creating an object. That is the heart of all the nervous system…the heart of all our activity.”11
Throughout the 1970s Gustin concentrated most of his attention on his theatre design work, at the same time as he produced jewelry for Ungaro’s collections—sometimes as simply as beaded necklaces, but most often variations on sculpted metal collars and torques. Vogue called the pieces he designed for Ungaro’s Fall-Winter 1975-76 collection the “most fascinating anywhere in Paris” with “clean, sculptural shapes in brass or colored glass, hanging from chains of brass tubing.”12
For Fall-Winter 1977-78 the showpieces returned, this time effortlessly combined with transparent fabrics. Gold breastplates in the shape of butterflies, spread eagles, zinnias, dragonflies and sunbursts; all curved to fit the chest, as if armor, and some with bright enamel detailing; attached chiffon shirts and capes threaded with gold. Fantasy clothes with little ties to reality, though Gustin’s ten years of study had perfected the metal alloy for optimum comfort. This was the last main collection that Ungaro and Gustin collaborated on and it is one that zings with the perfection of a team working at their peak.
As it stands, the last theatrical performance that I found with sets by Gustin was in 1991; I have yet to find any mention of him or obituary since then. Emanuel Ungaro retired and sold his house in 2005; many designers and several owners have tried to resuscitate it in the last 16 years, most with poor results. In 2011 the house retrieved the most striking of Gustin’s work from the archives for a presentation profiling the eleven year collaboration, which was displayed in their flagship boutique in Paris.
Claude Sarraute, “‘Don Juan,' de Molière,” Le Monde, February 8, 1967, 14.
Mel Gussow, “Stage: Comédie-Française ‘Dom Juan,’” New York Times, February 7, 1970, 24.
Claude de Leusse, “Sculpting Fashion,” Women’s Wear Daily, September 26, 1969, 4.
“The Tree…”, Vogue, March 15, 1968, 53.
“Paris: sculpture and the body at Ungaro,” Vogue, September 15, 1968, 91.
de Leusse.
Margaret Crimmins, “‘Colorful’ Ungaro," Washington Post, July 31, 1969, C1.
Eugenia Sheppard, “Brass Breasts Bared by Sao,” Hartford Courant, April 8, 1969, 21.
de Leusse.
The costumes were described as both evoking “the violence and daring of the circus” and also as “ugly and irrelevant” by the French press. I’ve been unable to find any photos of them.
B. Poirot-Delpech, “Vincent et l’amid des personnalités,” Le Monde, Nov 7, 1969, 12.
M.C. “Vincent et l’amid des personnalités,” Le Monde, May 10, 1974, 29.
Etta Froio, “A New Philosophy In Ungaro’s RTW,” Women’s Wear Daily, September 15, 1969, 23.
“Paris: The New Appeal,” Vogue, October 1, 1975, 172.