Jean Paul Gaultier

Jean Paul Gaultier, the French designer born in Arcueil in 1952, made the corset into outerwear in the 1980s and designed the cone-cupped satin corsets Madonna wore on her 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour. No designer did more to take lingerie shapes out of the dressing room and put them on stage.

Trained by Cardin, Esterel and Patou

Gaultier never went to fashion school. Pierre Cardin hired him as an assistant in 1970. He worked for Jacques Esterel in 1971 and then at Jean Patou, before returning to Cardin to manage the house's boutique in Manila until 1974. He presented his first collection under his own name in 1976 and founded his label in 1982.

The early collections set out his themes. His 1983 "Boy Toy" collection brought back the Breton sailor's striped top for men, and in 1984 he showed skirts for men. The same year he introduced the corset with conical cups, the shape that would become his signature.

Corsetry worn on the outside

The cone cup was a quotation. It borrowed the stitched, pointed silhouette of the 1950s bullet bra and exaggerated it until it read as sculpture rather than support. Gaultier put it on corset dresses and bodysuits meant to be seen, part of a wider 1980s turn toward underwear as outerwear. The point was the reversal. A garment that had been hidden, and that carried associations of restraint, was worn as a statement of confidence.

Peach satin for Blond Ambition, 1990

Madonna called him in 1989. "When Madonna first called me in 1989, it was two days before my ready-to-wear show, and I thought my assistant was joking," he later recalled. For the tour he made two corsets with conical cups, one in peach-toned satin and one in gold.

Blond Ambition opened on April 13, 1990, at Chiba Marine Stadium in Japan. In the opening number Madonna wore a pinstriped suit over the corset, with the cups pushing through slits in the jacket, so the outfit staged the whole idea of underwear coming through clothing. The image traveled around the world. One original corset from the tour sold at auction in 2001 for more than $21,000.

Hermes, La Perla and the last show

Gaultier's career after the tour ran on several tracks. He launched the perfume Classique in 1993. Hermes bought 35 percent of his company in 1999, and he was creative director of Hermes womenswear from 2003 to 2010. In 2011 he designed a collaboration with the Italian lingerie house La Perla, bringing his corsetry back to its source in the lingerie trade. The Spanish group Puig took control of his fashion and fragrance businesses in 2016.

On January 17, 2020, he announced that his next Paris haute couture show would be his last. By then the cone bra had long since become one of the most copied images in fashion, and a standard reference whenever a designer puts a corset on the runway.

Last updated October 7, 2026