On the first night of Madonna’s Blond Ambition tour, held in April 1990 in Japan, what became iconic other than her performance was the pink conical bra that was designed by ace Jean Paul Gaultier.

It is said that the pop icon personally requested the designer to create the costumes for the tour and the look was the result of many months of collaboration, with fittings taking place both in New York and Gaultier’s ateliers in Paris.

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However, in a fresh interview with Guardian.com, Gaultier says that Madonna was not the first one to carry that look. He said that it was his grandmother, Marie Garage’s cache of corsetry, which the young Jean-Paul discovered while rifling through her belongings when she was with clients. This inspired him to make a conical paper bra for his teddy bear.

“I wanted a doll, not a bear, but I did its hair and used my grandmother’s makeup on it. And I made a conical bra for it: it was the first conical bra, even before Madonna’s.

“I grew up on television, not books, and I’d also seen this programme that showed you could cut a circle out of a circle to make a skirt, so I made a hole in one of my grandmother’s lace mats and turned it into a skirt for the bear,” he told the publication.

The 68-year-old, who officially retired after his 50th-anniversary haute couture show in January 2020, says that when Madonna first called him in 1989, he thought his assistant was playing a prank on him.

“I’d seen her singing Holiday on Top of the Pops and thought she was absolutely my style – the jewellery, the crucifixes, the way she dressed, her look – this was what I was doing with my collection. I adored her,” he said.

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He has also worked with Carla Bruni, the former model who became France’s first lady, Eva Herzigová, Nicole Kidman and Beyoncé, and says he is very fond of Naomi Campbell. “She has an exceptional grace and beauty. Even if she does always arrive very late, she is really someone special.”

Gaultier, 68, presented his first haute couture collection to acclaim in 1997.

Currently, he wants to work on fashion-adjacent projects; one of these is CinéMode, which will run from October to January at the Cinematèque in Paris, and is an exhibition of 100 film costumes that have left their mark on fashion, from those of Marlene Dietrich to James Bond via Superman.