In A Vibrant World Of JCDC

This is fashion designer and artist Jean-Charles de Castelbajac’s twenty third apartment in Paris, and possibly his last. “We are looking for a house,” he says, pouring coffee from his own-designed ceramic pot into a pair of espresso cups with brightly coloured china wings for handles. “I want to make larger sculpture, and I need a bigger atelier. That might mean a move out of the city.”

The current family home is a classic Haussmann apartment in the 17th arrondissement, a short walk from the Arc de Triomphe, next to a boulangerie selling madeleines and jet-black charcoal baguettes and overlooking a corner of fruit stalls. The 72-year-old designer, known for his use of cartoon imagery and primary bright colours, moved here two years ago, after his wife – the poet Pauline de Drouas, 36 – discovered she was pregnant. “Our home at the time was a more romantic apartment, with a garden,” he says. “But we needed somewhere functional, with a space I could work in.” A couple of days after the couple’s daughter Eugenie was born last year, the French capital went into Lockdown. The move had been fortuitous: “I was able to draw and work every day. Some of the drawings I made are in a book that hast just been published. I also spent a lot of time writing songs for Eugenie. Having her was the best therapy in the world.”

The designer who rose to fame in the 1970s for his upcycled, pun-packed designs, and who has counted Keith Haring, Andy Warhol and Malcolm McLaren among his closest friends and collaborators, made a major move back into the fashion industry when he took over as creative director of Benetton at the start of 2019. It made perfect sense – Castelbajac’s familiar colour palette of blue, green, red and yellow is in tune with the Italian label’s DNA, and the designer worked extensively with Benetton’s iconoclastic image maker, the photographer Oliviero Toscani, for years. Next to Castelbajac’s dining table is a wall of portraits shot by Toscani in the 1980s, featuring friends wearing the designer’s Iceberg label knitwear: “Vivienne, Andy, Franco Moschino and Ettore Sottsass… all the biggest influencers of the time,” he says.

Iceberg is still around today, but it is Castelbajac who conceived it in the 1970s. At the same time as his friend McLaren was inventing punk in London, he was creating knits emblazoned with cartoon characters, from Road Runner and Jerry to Felix the Cat in Paris, that went on to define a new streetwear movement, embraced by the world of hip hop. “Those clothes became the heraldry of Afro American kids,” he says. “And that was a long time before they were given the respect they have now, as the royalty of influencers.”

Castelbajac calls his apartment a typical “cabinet of curiosities”. It houses a collection of memories and artefacts from a fifty-year career – pieces he has made himself, furniture by his late friend Sottsass (founder of the postmodern Memphis collective) and artworks by Keith Haring and other friends. There’s a chair he decorated in collaboration with Kanye West, and in the corner of one room there’s another, with a jacket hanging over the back, stitched together from different coloured teddy bears. “It was first worn by LL Cool J back in the 1980s,” he says. “I remember he said that he felt wearing my clothes made him feel like he was wearing the equivalent of a coat for Henry VIII”. In recent years he has a become popular figure in London’s grime scene, flattered by receiving the moniker “JCDC”.

For someone so obsessed with colour, it’s surprising that Castelbajac has such an impressive collection of black and white photography, including notable works by Diane Arbus and his old friend Robert Mapplethorpe. But they are part of what he calls his “duality”. “Before I came to use colour, which I now call my ‘weapon’, I designed using no colour at all.” He also points out that there’s always black in his work. “I use colour as my armour, and I have a small palette, but there’s always black. Without it, there’s no structure.”

Castelbajac’s assault of colour has invaded unlikely citadels. In 1997 he dressed 500 bishops, 5,000 priests and Pope John Paul II. The Pope’s gown, emblazoned with coloured crucifixes embroidered with gold outlines by Lesage, ended up in the Met’s 2018 Heavenly Bodies fashion extravaganza, while the image of thousands of clergies clad in rainbow stripes has become iconic. I ask him how familiar he is with what the rainbows drawn by countless children in homage to the NHS, put in windows across the UK. “I love it! It’s what I’ve been doing with my installation and workshop – Le peuple de demain – at the Pompidou until next May, inviting children to come and create their own flags and symbols. When I used the rainbow with the Vatican it was before Instagram. Now, think of the power of how we can bring people together. The rainbow is the symbol of the gay community, the Incas and of peace. It brings together all communities. For me, it is the flag of the universe. It is the only flag that has power today or matters.”