Jean-Paul Goude is an image-maker. Even if the name is entirely unknown to you, you will probably have seen his campaigns. He placed a twittering Vanessa Paradis in a birdcage and filmed women screaming 'Egoiste!' from a pink mock-up of a Cannes hotel (built in Brazil), both for Chanel. He conceptualised, produced and directed the Paris parade which marked the bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989. Most famously of all, however, he conceptualised, produced and directed the happening which became known as Grace Jones.
Goude was in Hong Kong recently to unveil an installation he had created for the launch of Chanel's 5 Elements high jewellery. We first met, briefly, at the show's opening: the restaurant, Mezz, had been transformed into a black hole flickering with tiny holograms of fashion folk, looking like the celebrated Cottingley fairies except better dressed. In one corner, a real-life model gazed into a mirror in which her reflected scalp and hands magically danced with flames. 'Like Marguerite in Faust,' explained Goude. I asked if, in that case, he was Mephistopheles but he replied, with great emphasis, 'no, no'.
He must be used to that assumption: for many people, mostly women, he was the devil to Jones. He literally put her (as he would later place Paradis) in a cage, where she devoured raw meat for the delectation of night-clubbers. 'To a lot of writers, especially black writers, I'm the evil white man controlling black women,' said Goude, when we talked in Vong, at the Mandarin Oriental hotel, the following afternoon. 'It's the opposite! I'm good at dramatising what exists already. I never invent. Grace was already the party ...' Animal? I suggested, and he laughed: 'Exactly.' He met Jones in 1978. By that stage, his sexual fascination with black women - and Arab and Asian women (his wife, Karen Park, is Korean and they have two children, aged five and two) - must have been ingrained because he says it began when he was seven. (When I asked his age, he replied, 'Don't force me to lie, you can work it out.' I'd guess late 50s.) He grew up, half-Irish-American and half-French, next door to the Museum of the Colonies in Paris. 'The whole front of the building had sculpted naked women on it, the fantasy of the conquerors.'
The fantasy of colonial, conquering men, I said meaningfully, and he replied, mildly enough, 'But handed on to children who were innocent.' As a result he loved King Solomon's Mines, The Jungle Book (he would later write an autobiographical tome called Jungle Fever) and black culture. Did he ever want to be black? 'I suppose I envied the body co-ordination. I'd go to clubs and start dancing next to really good black guys, I'd show off, go into a semi-trance and think I was as good as they were.'
The interesting thing about this is Goude was a trained dancer, as his mother had been, but he wasn't good enough to be a professional one: he was told he was too short and had too odd a face ('Irish turned-up nose'). You sense, paradoxically, that his physical attributes have never matched his professional imagination. When he came back from being photographed on the roof of the Mandarin Oriental, for example, I asked how he felt about his own image.
'Strange question,' he said (because he was compulsively smoothing down his windswept hair and checking himself out in a mirror at the time, I would have to disagree). He hesitated. 'To tell you the truth, if I could retouch every photograph of me, I would. That's the truth. I'm as vain as they come. I'm so dissatisfied with my equipment.' I mentioned that while he was being photographed I'd written the word 'appealing' in my notebook; he has an attractive, clown-like charm and, far from feeling diabolically threatened, I felt I'd met an especially articulate leprechaun. This pleased him so much he leaned forward (appealingly).