Jean Paul Gaultier

If Mugler was the 1980s' designer of fantasy and Alaïa its designer of the perfect body, Jean Paul Gaultier was its designer of mischief. He took the rules of fashion - what men wear, what women wear, what goes underneath and what goes on top - and cheerfully broke them all, and he did it with a real tailor's skill.

He had no formal training. As a teenager he sent sketches to Pierre Cardin, who hired him as an assistant in 1970, on his eighteenth birthday. He also worked for Jacques Esterel and at the house of Jean Patou before showing his own first collection in 1976. It took a few years to take off, but by the early 1980s he was one of the most talked-about designers in Paris, nicknamed the enfant terrible - the naughty child - of French fashion.

His best-known idea is the corset. He said he'd been fascinated since childhood by his grandmother's salmon-pink corset, and in the early 1980s he began making dresses that looked like foundation garments, with visible lacing, satin panels, and a stitched, conical bust. That was a direct reversal of centuries of dressing: underwear, designed to be hidden, became the outfit. The pointed cone bust became his signature, and the idea of underwear as outerwear went on to become a big theme for the rest of the 1980s. Its most famous moment came slightly after the decade, when he designed the corsets for Madonna's 1990 Blond Ambition tour - but it grew out of his own corset designs of the early 1980s, and it fit the underwear-as-outerwear spirit of mid-1980s club-kid style.

He played with gender just as freely. His 1985 menswear collection put men in skirts and sarongs, and he regularly gave women sharp men's tailoring. He loved Paris street culture and borrowed from it constantly: the striped Breton sailor top became his personal uniform, and his shows mixed punk, tattoos, and influences from many cultures, cast with unconventional models of different ages and body types. I think he's one of the most joyful designers in this section. Where the power silhouette took itself seriously, Gaultier suggested that clothes could be a joke you were in on - clever, sexy, and not at all respectable.