Jean-Paul Gaultier, cult hero of French fashion and veritable demi-God of Britain’s art school population, arrived in London this week for an audience with some of his student fans. The surprise was that the man who put men in skirts and knitted cones on women’s breasts turned out to be garrulous, good natured and funny clearly not someone who suffers from taking himself too seriously. (Why does one always associate the avant-garde with arrogance and lack of a sense of humour?)

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Gaultier had agreed to brief textile students for a Courtelle competition for which they’ll formulate new and mould-breaking fabrics which he’ll make up into a small collection for autumn 87. He talked animatedly about his beginnings as a designer and of his vision of future trends, holding up an engaging home-made collage of Surrealist and Dada cutouts to inspire his audience.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barbie and Ken dolls in outfits designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier, 1985. Photograph: Pierre VAUTHEY/Sygma via Getty Images

He likes, he says, “Futurist, artificial things that are not as they seem,” pointing to a polaroid snap of Mr Spock of Star Trek. “But this is not Spock. This is me!” – wig, pointy ears and all. Good for a laugh, that JPG.

Gaultier was perfectly frank about his less than brilliant early career. Twice fired, he ended up for two and a half years at Patou as one of a pair of assistants. “It was a very, very conservative ‘ouse, but it gave me the energy to escape.”

The path however, did not run smoothly. “My first collection was a flop. My second and third collections flopped.” Only in 1981, after being in business for five years, did he begin to get recognition, rising to his current status as the name on the label every sub-cult groupie covets most.

“My best collections are, I think, in rebellion against the other French designers,” he says, though he’s fed up with being called an enfant terrible. “Maybe it’s a question of generation. In Paris, all the fashion journalists are 55 or 60 years old. Perhaps that’s why they think I’m so young. But I’m already 34!”

The master counselled his audience to learn by his mistakes; stagy and riotous as his catwalk shows may seem, his success has been in providing such items as a perfectly cut navy blazer alongside the wilder excesses. Many are the fashion students who’ve had their heads disastrously turned by Gaultier’s shows, but he warned: “Fashion must not be an abstraction, it must not be art for museums. You can’t go on by doing outrageous things just to be known. Fashion must be worn. In some ways it’s a compromise, but life is a compromise.”

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Gaultier’s involvement in the Courtelle student project is a mark of his honest admiration for young British creativity. In the past, he has quoted directly from British cult and gang styles, turning punk into high fashion. His anglophile enthusiasms pull him across the Channel six times a year, and he wishes it could be more. “I love London. In Paris people are ‘orrible. French pop music is terrible. I ‘ate its mediocrity. British people are audacious, they dare to show their personality in what they wear. London gives me energy. I should live here all the time.”