“You’re not being ingenuous?”

He exploded with laughter, acknowledged the remotest possibility with a sidelong glance, and bellowed in English, “I seenk eet’s bee-u-tee-ful!”

Fashion editors call his clothes closet classics. The drama and tawdry exuberance of his fashion shows obscure their basis in deft coat-and-jacket tailoring, but his inventive mind cannot leave them there. He applies the imaging and technical advances of sportswear’s body hype, uses attention grabbers the way he does for rock musicians, and transposes finishes from one field to another, distressing fabrics the way furniture makers do, to add a patina that is the opposite of gloss. Then he distributes his ideas by hot line to the young—expanding fashion’s audience into areas other designers cannot reach. He picks up on street fashion and takes it to another stage, where the street yearns for it but can’t afford it.

The larger commercial world of fashion is intrigued, but Gaultier may never become a billionaire on the scale of Ralph Lauren or Calvin Klein. All the same, in a world of recycled fashion ideas, Jean Paul’s originality is a big commodity. A hungry market has learned to grab at the profusion of ideas he scatters negligently throughout his shows. Many, he says, came to him on the pavements of London and Paris.

But Jean Paul can no longer travel by metro without being inundated by fans, all of whom want something from him—conversation, work, inspiration, and to model in his shows. Now he goes by car, or he half runs, waving, grinning, shouting “Hul- lo!” but putting on speed until he outpaces even his most persistent admirers in his seven-league DM boots.

“Fashion has broken down into a number of different propositions, so it’s important to watch what’s happening. The object used to be to dress a certain social set and to dress the poor to look as though they were rich. Now fashion adapts itself to reality. Different sociocultural groups have their own way of living, their own food, their own decor. For each group there is a designer.”