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Interviews 61-year-old Jean Paul Gaultier, who after four decades is still regarded as the enfant terrible of fashion. His work is featured in the new exhibition \"The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk\" at the Barbican in London.

A photo shoot by photographer Matt Jones showcasing fashion and clothing, modelled by fashion designers. The photographs have a circus theme, and are accompanied by short quotes from the models, as well as descriptions and prices of the clothing. The following designers and labels are featured: Antonio Berardi; Ann Demeulemeester; American Apparel; Harrods; Belstaff; Christian Louboutin; Stephen Jones; Dolce & Gabbana; Jean Paul Gaultier; Bloch; Donna Karan; John Galliano; Giles Deacon; Sonia Rykiel; Thomas Pink; Paul Smith; Eternal Spirits; Valentino; Vivienne Westwood Gold Label; Vivienne Westwood (in role of model); Roland Mouret; Kilgour; Unconditional; Gucci; Christopher Bailey; Burberry Prorsum; Matthew Williamson; Louis Vuitton; and Moschino.

French fashion transcends the rules and invents new ones. It is successful due to their societal dimension, meaningful design and impeccable execution. It has also built on diversity whether it be gender, nationality or social. Women designers in France have always played a key role - Vionnet, Grs, Paquin, Jeanne Lanvin, Elsa Schiaparelli, Coco Chanel - to the point that there were as many women couture designers as men in the first half of the 20th century. International diversity played an early and huge role as well, Charles Worth, Cristbal Balenciaga, Schiaparelli and later on Nina Ricci and Paco Rabanne all came to France to express their talent and got worldwide recognition there, as, later on, did Karl Lagerfeld, Martin Margiela, Phoebe Philo, Riccardo Tisci, Raf Simons and Demna Gvasalia. We have to make sure France keeps its spirit of meaningful disruption, combined with impeccable execution.

[Christian Lacroix] still has plenty of affection for fashion: in 2013, he was briefly lured back to create a one-off couture collection for the relaunch of Schiaparelli. \"It was a dream,\" he says. \"I acted like a stage designer in charge of sketching costumes for a musical about Elsa Schiaparelli, with her as main character, not as a designer in charge of a couture customer wardrobe.\" It's not too different to how he approached fashion as a whole - as a stage for life, much as he designs his hotels and theatrical productions today. \"I loved seeing my sketches become reality on the runway,\" he says of his years in fashion, \"expressing my own world and fantasies in the most theatrical and operatic side of fashion... The Eighties was the most outrageous decade for fashion.\" \"Life beyond fashion is wonderful,\" laughs [Rifat] zbek. \"That should be your opening line!\" says the twice-crowned British Fashion Designer of the Year (in 1988 and 1992). After 30 years in fashion, zbek now describes himself as \"a designer. Not interior, not fashion: just a designer. I've got my cushion thing [Yastik by Rifat zbek], I've got the furniture, I've got all different sorts. I don't want to be categorised as just one thing.\" He still does fashion - he designed for Italian fashion label Pollini as recently as 2008 - but his most recent project? He designed the interiors for Robin Birley's London club Loulou's. Not fashion, but highly fashionable. Today she feeds her creative appetite designing interiors, mostly for hotels. \"I fall into things,\" she laughs. She's also fallen into designing wallpaper for Graham & Brown, and establishing her own brand, Iconclub, which utilises her eye for interiors and fashion products alike. \"After Biba we went to Miami, because Ronnie Wood said he was opening a club, and asked if I would like to design it,\" recalls [Barbara Hulanicki] of her Rolling Stones friend. \"Six months turned into two years... and we just never left.\" During that time, Hulanicki also met Island Records founder, Chris Blackwell, and a commission to design a video costume spun out into an entire hotel, the Marlin, in Miami. \"He bought 10 other buildings,\" Hulanicki says. \"And it kept going and going...\"

There's an undeniable magic in high heels. Vivienne Westwood described her platform shoes as putting women \"on a pedestal\". It was one of these which Naomi Campbell famously fell off - those heels are in the exhibition, too. When I wrote my first book, How to Walk in High Heels, in 2005, it was about how to do just about everything with confidence on that pedestal, my thinking being that if we women can walk in high heels, and juggle all challenges life throws at us, we'll be more invincible than Superwoman. \"Why are women obsessed with heels?\" asks another legendary shoe designer, Christian Louboutin, quizzically. Answering his own question, he continues: \"A woman knows they are an unnatural extension of her body and they give her extra body language.\" \"Shoes are to emphasise character,\" says [Manolo Blahnik], who seems far wiser, and certainly far better at shoes, than any Fairy Godmother. \"It's about knowing yourself and projecting this fantasy.\" That spans the entire gamut of footwear, from husband-catchers to retifistic fetish- stilettos; the high heels of Sex in the City (that still makes him squeal), to the flat. \"I LOVE flats!\" Manolo cries. \"So much more exciting that high heels. High heels do the work for you, flats you have to be really sensual, really sensuous to pull off - look at Brigitte Bardot and her ballerina flats.\" He pauses for breath. \"Shoes have to always be a pleasure, to be uncomfortable is obscene.\" If Cinderella could spend an evening in glass slippers rather than a pair of loafers, (look at the ruckus flats caused this year at Cannes), and Daphne Guinness can stay upright in heel-less creations custom-made by French couture cobbler Massaro, perhaps it's time to pepper-up your own collection? From the shoe designers to Elizabeth I and Marie Antoinette to Christian Dior's favoured shoemaker Roger Vivier and the contemporary realm of 3D printed heels, the V&A's exhibition highlights the passion, pleasure and our long-lasting fixation with footwear. \"The high heel is a tool of communication between the wearer and another person,\" says Louboutin. \"I try to create a flirty tool of communication that, happily, will never end.\"

I suppose the real question is \"What is elegance?\". It can be anything. Elegance comes from somebody being relaxed in what they wear, and actually being very comfortable with it. I think it's very difficult to define it, it's not necessarily a person or a three-piece suit, it's how somebody wears things and how they carry it. In cinema, there are the greats - someone like [Gary Cooper], for example, he has that nonchalant attitude that's just natural and relaxed. I think that is what becomes elegance. A show is theatre, basically, and with theatre it's much more immediate and of the moment. The thing with a show in fashion, whether it's couture or ready-to-wear, is that you don't have previews and you have to do it in a very intense amount of time, which I completely thrive on. I love that, but you have one chance to get it right. That's part of the energy and the excitement.

Oh my God - like magic. The one I remember best was Bianca [Jagger] opened with a cane, it was crazy... I miss most of it. [Ossie Clark] would say, \"Do whatever you want to do,\" and John [Galliano] would say \"The Princess was trapped in Europe and she wants to go to Scotland...\" [which] doesn't say a thing about the shoes, but it's enough... Oh, I was going to talk about Mr [Irving] Penn... He photographed me in 2002 for The New Yorker and said to me, \"Do you have heels in your shop or office?\". And I said, \"Yes I do sir\". He asked, \"What is the best way to photograph the heel?\". In the picture I am holding the heel in ecstasy, like Saint Teresa... it's one of my favourite photographs.

It seems fitting that [Jean Paul Gaultier]'s exhibition hits London before being shown in his home town of Paris (it's slated for the Grand Palais next year), as the UK capital remains a huge source of inspiration and fascination. \"I should say London is very important for me, for many reasons,\" Gaultier states, almost seriously. \"One, I only realise now ... because of my grandfather. His mother was English ... maybe this influence my future relations with England, because you know, 'e was 'alf English? He was quite fascinating in reality, I regret not to have taken more time speaking with him but I was eight when he died.\" Gaultier sparkles as he speaks, like an animated seven-year-old, perhaps trying to gain praise from an austere grandfather. \"But I am very proud I have a leetle part of 'Roast Beef'.\" '.\" He laughs, and laughs. Tattoos are an unconventional, but immediately recognisable, trademark of the house of Gaultier. He even titled a much-copied collection Les Tatouages in 1994 -- and they feature heavily in the hallowed halls of the Barbican. As does another classic Gaultier code, possibly the most recognisable of all: the corset. You may think Madonna and her conical breasts, but the Barbican goes one better, featuring the first-ever Gaultier corset, crafted by a pre-teen Jean Paul for his teddy bear -- Nana Bear. \"He's a star! He see the world, he's more important than me now!\" Gaultier says of Nana. \"Fashion express me, so this is the most intimate part of myself, my first creation, my first muse,\" he peels with laughter at the thought. \"You will see the state it's in, it's a monster! I was taking the powder of my grandmother and putting powder on the teddy bear and the lipstick, but it didn't stay. \" The road from Nana to Madonna was simple, it seems. \"The time of the 'I burn my bra' was past, it was more like 'I want to have that, not because we are obliged, but we want to be seductive',\" declares Gaultier, of the post-feminist reclamation of the raiments of a boned and bombasted fashion past. \"I went to New York and saw a show set in the backstage of a Thirties cabaret. They were all with corsets, all deshabille, and it reminds me the corset that I saw with my grandmother ...\" -- she was a beautician and masseur, so it's less weird than it sounds. Madonna wore \"one of my corsets from 1985, for the premier Susanna Seeking (Desperately Seeking Susan) ... et voila, she wore with men's suspender instead of shoulder straps -- mixing men and women. She was into corsetry, she asked to Frederick's of 'Ollywood the 'Who's That Girl' tour and I think, please, she should better ask me because truly it's my speciality and I love it.\" He throws his hands up, \"Et, then, voila! She did.\"

I remember a really early Galliano show, when we had all these wolves howling at the start... The vibe was incredible and everyone, the whole audience, literally thousands of people, started howling, just joining in. Then all of a sudden it all went quiet and someone went 'Meow'! It was a brilliant start. It's all about the emotion. Emotion can be conveyed in lots of different ways in music. I remember my granddad took me to a cricket match, when I was about six or seven, in Kennington. It was only 10 in the morning and there were these Jamaicans drinking Special Brew or something. By midday they'd drunk them all and started making music with the tins. I wasn't interested in the cricket at all, I was just watching these people - that was the first time I had seen any 'live' music.