The designer’s fascination with transformation and transgression has seen his work cross – and erase – boundaries between cultures, sub-cultures and the sexes. His skirts for men created a huge stir when they first appeared in 1985. Gaultier, along with Ann Demeulemeester, Martin Margiela, Comme des Garçons and Helmut Lang, made androgyny one of fashion’s defining characteristics in the 1980s and ‘90s.

So ground-breaking was Gaultier’s early work that many examples of it are housed in the permanent collection of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. Curator of fashion at the V&A Oriole Cullen tells BBC Culture there was “an inclusivity about Gaultier’s work, he always encouraged different body shapes on the catwalk, and there was a joy and positivity about it. He was very inspired by punk and the New Romantics, and what was called at the time ‘gender-bending’. He did it with a great sense of humour.”

Fun, yes, though there was also a sense that the designer had a point to make about gender and stereotypes. Gaultier loved subversion, and his tailoring for women was mannish with a twist. One of his muses was Edwige Belmore, the so-called ‘queen of Paris punk’ who was the inspiration for Gaultier’s iconic outerwear bra and man-jacket combination. The designer told Dazed in 2014: “I was surrounded by women [growing up], especially my grandmother. . . .You know there is an expression in France that I find awful which is sois belle et tais-toi (‘be beautiful and shut up’)…. I realised there was an injustice there. Women can have a brain and also be beautiful, you know? And boys, with all the attributes of masculinity like money and manpower, I found it so stupid.”

Dress codes

Of course, cross-dressing is nothing remotely new. The V&A’s Oriole Cullen gives as one of the best known historical examples the 18th Century French diplomat, soldier and transvestite the Chevalier d’Eon who lived much of his life as a woman. Later, she points out, Claude Cahun, a French Surrealist photographer who was born a woman identified herself as ‘agender’ in the early part of the 20th Century.

But when and why has androgyny seeped into the mainstream?

Looking back, it seems that social upheaval and a rise in androgynous styles often went hand in hand. The 1920s was a particularly defining moment, according to Cullen. “The look for women was very gender neutral with underwear designed to flatten breasts and a tubular silhouette, with hair bobbed short.” The timing was no accident, she says. “It was the birth of modernity, there were lots of young women entering the workforce and becoming independent.” The formidable Marlene Dietrich and Lauren Bacall were among the early female movie icons who played with androgyny. And during World War Two, functional trousers, brogues and boyish knitwear, meanwhile, became popular garb for the British Land Girls.

The 1960s saw another upsurge in androgynous dressing for both women and men, as the counter culture took hold, women’s liberation gained ground and social mores changed. When the Rolling Stones played London’s Hyde Park, Mick Jagger wore a ‘man’s dress’ designed by British designer Mr Fish. Meanwhile Yves Saint Laurent’s tuxedo for women, Le Smoking, created in 1966, was a landmark in mannish chic. Saint Laurent told Women’s Wear Daily: “I thought the Smoking was more modern than an evening gown. It played with a certain ambiguity…. I created something that looked equally chic on men and women.”