The description `enfant terrible' has followed Jean Paul Gaultier (the son of two accountants) around for over 20 years. Now nudging 50 years old, Gaultier does 60 daily press-ups and sports cropped peroxide-blond hair.
Gaultier's career commenced on his eighteenth birthday when he was employed as a sketcher at Pierre Cardin. A year later he moved to Esterel, then to Jean Patou, where he worked for two years - first with Michael Gomez, then Angelo Tarlazzi - before returning to Cardin, based in the fashion backwater of Manila in the Philippines. Gaultier returned to Paris in 1976 and began making electronic jewellery with his partner, Francis Menuge, and in 1978 presented his first fashion collection without success. `I was a joke for three years,' he told the Sunday Express in 1987, `And in France to be a joke is not funny.' He hit his stride in the mid-1980s, generating reams of newspaper copy with his catwalk escapades, conical corsetry and skirts for men. The latter, he claimed at the time, resulted in sales of 3,000 skirts worldwide. Vogue described an early collection as `a motley fusion of punk pilferings, slattern sophistication and B-movie anecdotes'. His finest hour was dressing Madonna in a mix of satin corsetry and black bondage for her Blonde Ambition tour of 1990.
No one could accuse Gaultier of being a one-trick pony. He successfully produces both mens- and womenswear, diffusion and couture. Gaultier has run the gamut from fetishistic fabrics - rubber and PVC - to conventional wools and cotton/Lycra. His first fur collection was unveiled in 1998. He has worked several times with choreographer Régine Chopinot, dressed countless pop stars and even released his own album of house music, How to do that?, with Tony Mansfield, in 1989. His cinematic costume credits include City of the Lost Children (1995) by Caro and Jeunet, Luc Besson's The Fifth Element (1997) and, the one which was probably most suited to his style, Peter Greenaway's 1989 celebration of decadence, The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover. Gaultier's autobiography, A Nous Deux la Mode, published in 1990, was suitably kitsch in content and cover, with Gaultier posing in a nautical striped T- shirt, surrounded by flowers. In 1999 he was the first French fashion designer to go on-line.
A self-confessed Anglophile, who is more likely to be found rummaging in Camden market than admiring historical exhibits, Gaultier co-hosted Eurotrash, a saucy tabloid television show, during the 1990s. He appeared weekly, invariably wearing a kilt and a wide grin, and played up his French accent for all it was worth.
In 1997 Gaultier's first couture collection revealed a host of hidden attributes - restraint for one - and received favourable reviews. In one of his earliest Vogue appearances he said, `My affinities are with the young and unorthodox, so I create costumes that break rules, go over the top if you like .' Irony is still his speciality. Long may his quirkiness continue.
