All too often Jean Paul Gaultier has been called an “enfant terrible”.

Not only is the catchphrase hopelessly overused, it also suggests a revolutionary fury, a snarling militancy alien to the French couturier's cheerful temperament.

"Terrible" would be Gaultier at best in the positive sense of the word, since everyone who knows him even a little praises not only the "great", even "fantastic" creator, but also the approachable and humorous person.

Although privately he is not spared from drama – his business and life partner Francis Menuge died in 1990 as a result of AIDS – Gaultier as a public person is the most undramatic fashion designer of all: neither drugs nor depression, neither scandals nor affairs.

In its first half, however, the characterization as an "enfant terrible" applies.

Gaultier has retained his childlike disposition: he is attracted to everything that glitters and gurgles, colorfully smirks and popularly babbles.

High culture is not his thing: the son of a secretary and an accountant, who grew up in the tranquil, middle-class Parisian suburb of Arcueil and dreamed of a future as a hairdresser, confectioner or clothes maker in his beloved grandmother's private ladies' salon between Nana the teddy bear and the single-channel television set. prefers listening to Boy George to Boulez, prefers Almodóvar Antonioni and finds Frida Kahlo more fascinating than Sophie Calle.

Many of his models have something naïve and fairytale-like about them: an evening dress covered with a whole leopard skin that, on closer inspection, turns out to be a trompe-l'oeil made of countless embroidered beads;

a mermaid whose nakedness disappears under a flood of silvery Rapunzel hair and two plastic rosaries;

Bride and groom covered from head to toe in lily-white cable-knit knitwear.

And is it a coincidence that the first Gaultier boutique on Paris' rue Vivienne resembled a Pompeian toy submarine and that the designer designed the costumes for a film called The City of Lost Children?

A "conservative" provocateur

If one were to limit oneself to one reason why Gaultier is sure of a prominent place in the pantheon of fashion, it would be his contribution to the emancipation – of men.

Since the men's collection with the programmatic title "Et Dieu créa l'homme" in 1985, the designer has dressed the so-called stronger sex in evening dresses and miniskirts, let them be charmed by bare backs, put them in corsets and boleros, put on them satin bell-bottoms with puffy protruding tulle flounces and adorned it with ruffles and feathers, bows and veils, pearls and sequins.

Why shouldn't men be allowed to flirt and parade too?

In 1996, when John Galliano was put ahead of him to head Dior's couture department, Gaultier retaliated in his constructively peaceful way,

As a women's couturier, the grown-up banlieue boy demonstrated a technical mastery that was in no way inferior to that of his compatriots Azzedine Alaïa and Christian Lacroix.

To the general public, Gaultier is the inventor of the tapered brassiere popularized by Madonna.

That is wrong (Saint Laurent had already copied these forms from Bambara sculptures in 1967), but above all anecdotally in relation to the incomparably more important rehabilitation of the corset.

This, often garnished with fetishistic or S&M set pieces, formed Gaultier's trademark in the field of women's fashion.

But don't worry: The couturier was – according to his own statement – ​​a “conservative” provocateur whose childhood world knew nothing dirty, let alone perverse.

Sex was a playful, relaxed thing for him.

One last unique selling point remains: humor.

The virtue that is rare in the fashion industry is given to the designer in abundance.

His "Western Baroque" collection in 1989 populated cowboys in leopard prints hiding their revolvers in umbrellas.

"Les Poupées" lured in 1986 with "petticoats for every occasion".

Once Gaultier transformed a trench coat into a bathing suit, another time he put a headgear on a mannequin consisting of a miniature birdcage, a doll's fiddle and a dwarf bugle.

In 2010, the brilliant kid handed over the management of women's prêt-à-porters at Hermès, closed the ready-to-wear department of his own company in 2014, and in 2020 he also stopped designing his couture collections.

The future of the company Jean Paul Gaultier (no hyphen!) is now the responsibility of younger designers every year (in the couture sector, after Chitose Abe and Glenn Martens this year Olivier Rousteing), their founder continues to act as a brand ambassador.

On Sunday, the greatest living French fashion designer, who can only be compared to Yves Saint Laurent in terms of his longevity and creative potency, celebrates his 70th birthday.

We bet that his favorite cake, Pierre Hermé's classic pink Ispahan, will only have seven candles burning.