Jean-Paul Goude

Jean-Paul Goude (born 8 December 1940) is a French graphic designer, illustrator, photographer and advertising film director. He worked as art director at Esquire Magazine in New York during the 1970s, and famously choreographed the 1989 Bicentennial Parade in Paris to mark the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. In addition, over the last three decades, he has created well known campaigns and illustrations for brands including Perrier, Citroën, Kodak, Chanel and Shiseido

Early life

Goude was born on 8 December 1940 in Saint-Mandé, a small suburb of Paris. Both his father, a French native, and his American mother, a former Broadway dancer, had been active in the New York show-business scene prior to his birth. In France, his mother ran a dance school, which he described as the ground for his "lifelong obsession with the dynamism of movement and form." She also inspired him by exposing him to different forms of print media. "At home, we received American magazines,” Goude told Vogue Magazine. “The advertising, in the 1960s, was extraordinary. The first time an issue of Esquire arrived with a cover by George Lois, I said to myself, that’s what I want to do." He studied at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris before embarking on his career as an illustrator.