Jean-Paul Gaultier is a French haute couture and prêt-à-porter fashion designer.

His collections have both been influenced by and inform popular culture. He has designed unforgettable looks for cultural icons including the infamous cone bra for Madonna's 1990 Blond Ambition Tour. Gaultier has also designed costumes for Marilyn Manson, Marion Cotillard, and Kylie Minogue, and been credited for starting the Granny Gray and pastel hair trend, after his Autumn/ Winter 2011 and Spring 2015 models were styled with gray hair.

Gaultier's presentations have been known to include unconventional elements by playing with traditional gender roles and featuring older, full-figured, pierced and heavily tattooed models.

Gaultier began his career in fashion, working for the avant-garde designer, Pierre Cardin, as well as Jacques Esterel and Jean Patou later that year.

His first individual collection was released in 1976, and his characteristic irreverent style dating from 1981 has led to his being known as the enfant terrible of French fashion.

Fashion editors, notably Melka Tréanton of Elle, Claude Brouet and Catherine Lardeur of French Marie Claire, were impressed by his creativity and mastery of tailoring and later launched his career.

In 1985, he introduced man-skirts and promoted their use, especially kilts, in men's wardrobe, and the release of designer collections.

Gaultier is also well known for sponsoring the 2003–04 exhibit in the Costume Institute of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled "Braveheart: Men in Skirts," which showed designs by Gaultier, Dries van Noten, Vivienne Westwood, and Rudi Gernreich.

What brought Gaultier immense success was the advent of his haute couture line in 1997. Through this collection, he was able to freely express the scope and range of his aesthetic, drawing inspiration from radically divergent cultures, from Imperial India to Hasidic Judaism. As a result of this success, Hermès hired Gaultier as creative director from 2003 to 2010.

In 2011, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with the Maison Jean Paul Gaultier organized a retrospective exhibit, "The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk."That exhibit toured at venues at the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design (Arkitektur- och designcentrum, ArkDes) in Stockholm, the Brooklyn Museum in New York City, the Barbican Centre in London, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and the Grand Palais in Paris. The exhibition in Paris, which took place from April to August 2015, was the subject of a documentary called Jean Paul Gaultier at the Grand Palais.

Up until 2014, Gaultier designed for three collections: his own couture and ready-to-wear lines, for both men and women. At his spring/summer 2015 show, he announced that he was closing the ready-to-wear labels to focus on haute couture.

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