A my Winehouse‘s father was less than impressed with Jean Paul Gaultier using his late daughter as a muse for his spring 2012 haute couture vision. Mitch Winehouse said that the Haute Couture collection, where models were clad in the “Back to Black” singer’s beehive hairstyle, was “in bad taste.”
“The family were upset to see those pictures, they were a total shock,” Winehouse told The Sun. “We’re still grieving for her loss, and we’ve had a difficult week with the six month anniversary of Amy’s death. To see her image lifted wholesale to sell clothes was a wrench we were not expecting or consulted on.”
During the fashion show models strutted down the catwalk with beehived hair and winged eyeliner to a barbershop quartet singing her sounds. Gaultier intended the collection as an honest and quite literal take on the singer’s unique style, telling Women’s Wear Daily, “I think Amy Winehouse was truly a fashion icon.”
He added, “To me the scandal is that no fashion magazine did an Amy Winehouse cover. She was so exceptional in her style; how she held her body; the way she dressed, mixing pieces from different decades.”
What really stung the grieving father was the way Gaultier chose to dress the models in black veils, holding cigarettes.”We’re proud of her influence on fashion but find black veils on models, smoking cigarettes with a barbershop quartet singing her music in bad taste,” Mitch Winehouse added. “It portrays a view of Amy when she was not at her best and glamorizes some of the more upsetting times in her life. That’s upsetting for her family.”