French fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier was BOTD in 1952. Born in Arcueil near Paris, he showed an early interest in fashion, making clothes for his mother and grandmother by his early teens. At 18, he apprenticed for Pierre Cardin, somehow ending up in the Philippines designing for First Lady Imelda Marcos. He debuted his first womenswear collection in 1976, eventually opening his own fashion house in 1982. Labelled the enfant terrible of fashion, his collections combined Breton striped fisherman’s jerseys and corsetry with Gothic and punk rock influences. His designs typically blurred gender distinctions, dressing women in masculine jackets, hats, and leather, while his menswear featured kilts, corsets, and translucent fabrics. A dedicated sexual provocateur, he sexualised haute couteur by presenting underwear as outwear, most famously in the conical bra worn by Madonna in her Blonde Ambition tour. He made a stunning debut into film costume design in Peter Greenaway’s 1989 film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, fusing 18th century and 1980s fashions with bondage gear and colour-coding costumes to match Greenaway’s mise-en-scene. A regular collaborator with filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, he designed the outrageously sexualised costumes worn by Rossy de Palma in Kika and Gael García Bernal in La Mala Educación (Bad Education). In 1993, he expanded his product line to include Pour Femme and Pour Homme colognes, presented in torso-shaped glass bottles, while his cheerful presence as the co-host of 1990s TV show Eurotrash helped boost his international profile. Openly gay since forever, he was in a long-term relationship with his financier Francis Menuge until Menuge’s AIDS-related death in 1990. In 2003, Gaultier became creative director of luxury goods brand Hermès. Unusually for fashion designers, he avoided self-destruction or bankruptcy, staging a gradual retirement in 2001. He was appointed a Chevalier de la Lègion d’Honneur for his contribution to fashion design. A long-time resident of Paris, his current relationship status is unknown.