Gaultier ‘s Marinière
This celebrity couturier’s keen awareness of the fight against AIDS prompted him to design one of his trademark striped sailor’s shirts for the Born HIV Free campaign. Elle magazine distributed it with its 6 to 19 August issue and this shirt will soon be available online on Elle magazine’s seven European websites and on Orange.fr, which will sport this campaign’s livery on its home page as part of a vast sweepstake that both partner companies will be running.
We saw the first striped sailor’s shirts featuring the Born HIV Free campaign’s double-ribbon logo on the sleeve on newsagents’ stands this summer. Striped sailor’s shirts are Jean Paul Gaultier’s hallmark and he created this collector’s version especially for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS campaign. He placed the campaign’s adage, “Hope spreads faster than AIDS”, by the heart. “The heart is a mother’s heart. It is also, in a way, every heart. And it is also a way of reminding people that they can get AIDS through sexual intercourse,” Jean Paul Gaultier explained in this partner magazine. He added, “The striped sailor’s shirt is also a sign I can identify with. Sailors symbolise travel and the stripes represent the horizon. It’s all about hope. The fight against AIDS means a lot to me. As it means a lot to everyone else who has lost someone special. This disease took the love of my life.”
In the video promoting the shirt on Elle’s website, Jean Paul Gaultier said that he had only one regret: that he had not invented “the most beautiful garment of all: the condom.” Jean Paul Gaultier is a designer who has ushered society through change and even turned a few of its codes upside-down. And he has taken a stand again, doing what he does best: designing clothes as a way of sketching hope.
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy told Elle, “It wasn’t that Jean Paul agreed to design this T-shirt [...] he spontaneously volunteered to design it. He’s such a busy man, we really weren’t expecting him to. Jean Paul’s a friend of mine, of course, but it wasn’t our friendship that got him onboard this campaign.” Wearing this T-shirt is tantamount to making a statement to support this campaign to eradicate all mother-to-child HIV transmission by 2015. It is about citizens encouraging States to invest in the Global Fund. The ambassador for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS continues, “Jean Paul Gaultier’s creation will help us to get as many people as possible involved in the Born HIV Free campaign, so that children are no longer born with this virus – which medicine can actually stem today.
