[7th] pascal gaultier ➢ d8m

pascal

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( My brother, the painter, Pascal Gaultier. He is something to be saved, a runt from start to finish and a dreamer on top. Pascal's head is in the guillotine and yet it's still in the clouds, painting another masterpiece to tuck under his bed or desk. I sell them for him; he's too scared to pursue and fail and ruin another dream. Nothing hurts more than the fall. I've always tried to keep him grounded, but I fear he's gone too far this time. 

I'm 19, something I fear he'll now never see. He's a factory worker at a dye plant, and he comes home and takes what he learns and makes his own paints from scratch. I don't know how he does it, but he'll paint murals and canvases of the most fantastic things and I always imagined I'd work extra to put him through art school - whatever we can find and afford, really. Bits of it is robbed from us, he may never experience that. 

All that's really left right now is the dream, which is all he had to start with. )

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District 8 in the year of the 7th Hunger Games is a factory dystopian still, billowing towers define the sky line much better than the stars ever could. Man rules the ground, the Capitol rules man. It's a dog eat dog world - literally, when life runs out of lemons you start to dine on roadkill. Still better than Cannibalistic Capitolites, district socialites just tend to do it... better. 

Too brutal? Get used to it, doll, the only industry more killer than killers is fashion, and if you want to be someone in the middle of nowhere it's the only means left. District 8 is factories and smoke and pollution, and if you rub the methanol out of your eyes long enough you might catch the most extraordinary glimpses. Like visions, hallucinations, runways and cat walks of the most elongated models.

What's most wonderful is the clothes. When life takes everything, you make. That's what Pascal and his brother have learned - that's what it means to be a Gaultier. If you have something, anything, the bare bones and scraps and the only thing left is some delusional vision of excellence, you make something. Life can take, and take, and take again, and if all you have left is 5,000 toothpicks, you make a structured corset. You make accoutrements, you make bracers or a fascinator, you make a spiked choker, you embezzle a mohawk and say fuck you, world, and fuck you with a toothpick.

And what's best is you say it without a single word. They can't take it out of your mouth and execute you for it, they can't beat you and call it peace - all they can do is call it how it is.

Fashion.

That's all it is, really. Don't you agree?  

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In the depths of 8 stands a new-age bar, a dimly lit venue on the south-skirts of town. Quite out of the way, no one else knows why but its attendee's. Bella Noches, quaint and quiet, the only thing near it are a tobacco shop and a strip pole. It's a Peacekeeper trap - the bored ones leave town and station there at night, getting cheap booze and smoke and women; they're the worst ones. The bored peacekeepers look for something to do with their hands.

When Pascal is bored, he makes. Paints and clothes and art. They are a different breed of Panem - whether they're Capitolite born or not, all that matters is a man in a suit is a man with a gun is a man ready to kill. Recruits just mean they're not us anymore; whatever that means. Bella Noches, though, that is 'us.' The queer, the weird, the strange, when the sun is up, Bella Noches belongs to us and not them. The people District 8 belongs to is so different from who runs it, the industry could be something so much more majestic if it weren't for the Capitol. 

That's where life breeds in Bella Noches, one of the few safe spaces still alive in Panem from before the dark days. Before his time, memories that only exist in books that were destroyed. Pascal doesn't know where to start nor does he have the time left, but over the last few years he and his brother found family in the broke-down corner of 8 that is the Lime Village. When Peacekeeper's get too bored or too busy, the Lime Village goes back to the patrons.

To creators. To lovers and livers of life, and they wear the most extraordinary things made of nothing, and they look damn good while doing it. 

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Name's are such funny things. In the fashion industry, there's nothing more powerful than who you wear. It's like armor, no matter what it looks like, the Capitolites say it relentlessly on Television nowadays - I'm wearing Crowe, Fen, Shae, yada, yada. They make the most hideous garments of the most lavish material just to say I can afford it, and you can't? Well honey, let me tell you, you can buy all the chiffon and silk and lamé you want, but you can't buy taste.

These people, with everything they have, they have awful taste. They rewrite history - mark my words here, they can kill me but they can never kill good fashion. Destroy, destroy, destroy, but the Capitol will never be able to pull a wardrobe together as well as I could, and on much, much less. They will never be visionary, they will never push real boundaries. All they will ever do is sit on their mountain, and cut the districts off at the knees, and then blame us for our missing limbs. 

When I die, my brother will live, and mark my fucking word: you will not forget the Haus of Gaultier.