Jean Paul II

That self being slightly tanned and trim, sporting short blond locks (so subtle they could be grey) and wearing the typical French designer garb of black trousers and a black tailored shirt. The effect is underwhelming, but effective, signalling as it does the gravitas of the job in hand at the house of Hermès, potentially the world’s most revered fashion brand. The photographic session goes well – with studied portraits and thoughtful, somewhat wistful, full-length shots. Almost as an afterthought, photographer Steve Hiett piles six or so of the legendary orange Hermès boxes on JPG’s knees. Instinctively, JPG reaches up and takes a box; holding it to his mouth, he opens his teeth wide as if to take a bite. The shutter closes, the image is captured. JPG looks surprised and mildly rattled that, despite his best efforts, his alter ego has escaped without warning. We are back on familiar ground. You can take ze Frenchman out of his zany environment, but you cannot take ze zany out of ze Frenchman.

Being JPG is a pretty serious business these days. As well as Hermès, for whom he creates two collections a year, he has his own collections to manage – jeans, ready-to-wear, couture. Gossip has it that he employs 70 seamstresses for couture alone. This is not the picture he paints. “I am finally getting help,” he tells me in his heavily accented but perfectly grammatical pantomime French. Previously, he says, he had only an assistant to answer telephones at Jean Paul Gaultier; now, at last, he has some designers as well. “You know, I am treated better here than in my own house,” he says, laughing loudly as we tramp along the corridors of 24 searching for our lunch. The house of Gaultier is also 35 per cent owned by Hermès. This is not a coincidence. When Jean Louis Dumas, the Hermès CEO, picked up the phone to ask his business partner Gaultier for advice on who should replace the outgoing Martin Margiela, formerly Gaultier’s assistant, Gaultier threw out a few names: “Demeulemeester, Hussein Chalayan.” After he had put the phone down, he had an epiphany. “I thought about it. Then I thought about it again. I could not get it out of my head. And so, I thought, it must be me.”

JPG has wanted to be in fashion since he made a bra for his teddy, aged eight. “I was not a normal boy, I was not accepted. My school was at Patou. I made crazy sketches and I took them in. He took me from the school of nowhere.” His grandmother, “who loved me very much – it is never too much, yes?”, encouraged him. As the child of a book-keeper and a secretary, he was not expected to become a fashion designer. “No, but I knew that I was different, that I did not fit in. I loved the Folies Bergère and kitsch television.” I’m imagining that Gaultier, a notorious perfectionist, must be difficult to please and difficult to work for. The question is answered when we come across a tiny glass workroom, so incongruous with the rest of the building that it could have been stuck on in a Blue Peterish fashion with Copydex. Seated at long work desks lit by bright desk lamps are approximately eight people creating Hermès special orders – vast Kelly bags, small picnic hampers, cases to house CDs, fishing tackle and the polo kits of potentates. At the sight of Gaultier passing in the hallway, all work halts. There is a clamour of greeting and bonhomie, which rings eerily around the silent corridors. The foreman leaps from his desk to greet Gaultier, who opens the workroom door to say hello. The French PR smiles. “They love him,” she says, somewhat stating the obvious.

After five more minutes of yomping along narrow walkways cluttered with fax machines, printers and papers, we arrive at a vast office, the corner of which is dominated by a round table, dressed with a mustard-coloured Hermès tablecloth and set entirely with coral and white Hermès china and Hermès silver cutlery. An effusive chef arrives to tell Monsieur what she has created for him. The menu has more fish than Grimsby during its Seventies heyday. “Ee loves feesh,” says the chef by way of explanation or excuse. Gaultier also loves to eat. “It makes me happy,” he says, spearing a scallop waspishly. I tell him that he looks thinner. He grins. “That’s because I was so fat,” he says. “One day I looked in the mirror and I thought, ‘My God, who is that person?’ It was me.”

Gaultier’s job might just be the coolest in the fashion world right now; it is also potentially the most controversial. Although he has long been regarded as one of the most innovative and gifted designers (he showed his first collection in 1976), he has also always been branded as “edgy”. Reinvigorating one of the world’s most important brands was never going to be easy, particularly for a man who has been inspired by everything from the Koran to death: “Once I put a coffin on the stage and the girls came out as images of skeletons. I was playing with the concept of death. The English recognised what I was doing. In France it was a catastrophe – it was taboo.” As it turns out, “edgy” was just what the horsey house needed to reinvent its fashion business (those bags are still leaders in the accessories world). Gaultier worked his subversive magic very subtly. “I am not, how you say, abstract, like Rei Kawakubo,” he says, referring to the legendary Japanese designer. “I must start with a tradition, which I then twist.” There were plenty of traditions to choose from at Herm­ès, where they have been designing kit for horses and riders for decades. Of course, Gaultier could not resist the corset for his first show, “but I did it in a very Hermès way”. He also sent out girls wearing a bridle/veil combi, which commentators saw as a direct reference to a particular S&M practice. Since that first collection for Hermès, Gaultier has routinely elicited rave reviews; even when his playfulness extends to giant turtleshells as handbags and full-length crocodile skins as capes. “I am against inhumane killing,” he says. But not against the use of animals per se in fashion? “Oh no. Bof! We eat meat, we wear leather shoes,” he says, grinning, before he devours a mouthful of turbot.

In conversation, Gaultier consistently cites England as his inspiration, saying he has always wanted to live here. He remembers his first visit. “Everyone was punk, dressed in black, trying something different, and I thought, ‘This is genius.’” The gothic eccentricity, the extravagance and the individualism of the British inspires him. French style, he says, is over: “It left in the Seventies – bof! – everyone wears the same jeans now.” As befits a true Anglophile, he also says he loves the royals. “It has all changed now since that conversation, no?” Only Gaultier would remember the Tampax tapes. He stores information that interests or provokes him like a vast filing cabinet, reeling off to me all of the programmes he watched as a child and all of the fashion moments that have inspired him. His ability to take the past and twist it intelligently has long enthralled the critics, one of whom, Ben Brantley, The New York Times theatre critic, was moved to comment: “A Jean Paul Gaultier collection has more intellectual content than a lot of the plays I see.”

Kitsch plays a big part in Gaultier’s world. “I love kitsch, it makes me feel a sensation.” Nowhere is this more evident than in his first fragrance bottle, designed as a shapely torso in a pink and silver corset and packaged in a silver can. Launched at Saks Fifth Avenue with circus-like fanfare including tents, jugglers and possibly elephants, if my memory serves me, it was the store’s fastest-selling fragrance and is still hugely successful. Gaultier says he learnt about sexuality from the television from an early age: “My grandmother let me watch everything, even when it was prohibited.” He has talked before about his beloved grandmother’s forgetfully going out into the street wearing only her lingerie and slip. Perhaps this is why he was the first proponent of underwear as outerwear? Bra straps, corsets, frilly knickers, even pure nudity have been grist for Gaultier’s fashion mill; he was the first agent provocateur long before sexy lingerie stores were popular. I wonder aloud why he in particular and gay designers in general are able to tap into the female Zeitgeist so well? Gaultier looks serious: “I think that gay men are able to feel more of what women love. Our sensibility is not male and it is not female. We are more like a spectator looking on. In fact, we know them [women] more than men do.”

Perhaps as a result of his sexuality and of his upbringing Gaultier says he reveres women of all ages. “We must honour the past, it is very important,” he says, after telling me about his own introduction to Hermès via his mother’s fragrance, which was Calèche. “Women are the cleverer sex,” he continues. “They are fragile, so they have to be stronger and work harder to achieve.” His theory – and it is a good one if you think about it – is that equality will have arrived when male models (notoriously poorly paid) are paid as well as their female counterparts. “Then there really will have been a shift in the way we think.”

Politics are not his bag, though: “I don’t know anything. And anyway, all the ones with all the power could not stop the war.” His battlefield is sexual politics. Very early on, he played with gender stereotyping, putting men in sarongs, doing up his women’s suits on the right-hand side, putting a wallet breast pocket into all of his women’s jackets. “Why would it always be the men who had the money?” he asks.

It was, of course, his iconoclastic attitude to the semantics of style that led the arch ball-breaker herself, Ms Ciccone, to his door. Who else could have dressed the world’s greatest chameleon in a conical bra and waist-shrinking corset? And for whom else would the blonde one have stalked the cat­walk in her beret and breast-baring braces? “I adore Madonna,” says Gaultier, when a discussion ensues over lunch about her shape. “What she has in the head shows in the body.”

Before the interview ends, Gaultier is keen to show me the pièce de résistance of the building, which requires a retracing of steps through the labyrinth. His boss, Patrick Thomas, appears as we leave the room (it turns out that we have been lunching in his office). The two exchange jovial greetings and smiles. When he’s out of earshot, Gaultier whispers, “Here I really am free to do what I want. In fact, I could be even more free than I am.” From this I infer that he has not yet overstepped the mark as far as “the boss” is concerned.

Finally, we are on the roof of the Hermès building. A tiny, exquisite lawned area leads to a terrace with views stretching all the way down to the vast golden dome of Les Invalides, which houses the tomb of Napoleon. Gaultier joins me to take a peek at the awesome vista, then he swivels round and takes in the gardens and offices of the mighty Hermès with a sweep of his hand. “It’s cool, no?” he says with a grin.