Vice Style

Jean-Charles de Castelbajac is a 60-year-old French Marquis who designs clothes and is into grime music. In the early 1970s, along with photographer Oliviero Toscani, he devised an advertising campaign blending sex and religious sloganeering which scandalised the Vatican.

A decade later, Castelbajac turned Italian label Iceberg into a postmodern, pop-art fashion house, selling a lot of hijacked Snoopy, Daffy Duck and Felix the Cat imagery to Britain’s football hooligans. In the 90s, he convinced the Pope and 5,000 priests to dress in what looked like hundreds of gay flags. More recently, a number of de Castelbajac's designer admirers, such as Bernhard Willhelm, Cassette Playa and Jeremy Scott, have themselves become well-known, reaffirming de Castelbajac's position as the king of cartoon couture.

When I went to meet de Castelbajac inside his camouflaged neon Parisian store, he was negotiating a deal to become a creative director for a fireworks firm and was about to send off outfits for Beyonce and Lady Gaga's "Telephone" video.