A recent study in Manchester recorded that none of the tablets tested contained any MDMA at all.”Supplies are by no means reliable and, to tackle the problem, Saunders has set up a site on the Internet detailing pills on sale in the UK, something he sees as a continuation of previous consumer work on ordinary household products. But demand soon outstripped supply and any number of substances were being sold in the name of Ecstasy, from amphetamines MDA and MDEA, which are cheaper and easier to produce, to crude mixtures of LSD and speed. When E first arrived in Britain in the mid-Eighties, supplies consisted largely of “pure” MDMA. “The institutrice wanted to punish [distinctively rhymed with 'soonish'] me.

So she put the picture on my back and made me make a tour of all the different classes to make me ashamed. But in reality it was excellent because it made everybody like me.”Jean Paul Gaultier never had an academic introduction to fashion It was his drawings that got him in on the ground floor. He sent a selection round Paris fashion houses, and on his 18th birthday he received a phone call from Pierre Cardin, asking him to come and be his assistant. Was that a very formal environment to suddenly find himself in? “Cardin was a crazy man: nothing was very much established with him, so it gave me the idea of everything being possible.” Not all of Gaultier’s subsequent workplaces would prove so conducive. When he turned up to work for Jean Patou wearing riding boots: “People would say ‘where’s your horse?’ And they were not joking.”Patou’s gave him another glimpse of fashion fascism in the form of a model with a binding corset. “I was very shocked when I first saw it,” Gaultier remembers. “She said they thought she had too much [he mimes abundant breasts], but my mentality is always that when you are round you should show it and when you are slim you should show it.

You have not to be ashamed of yourself.” For all the extravagance of his most celebrated designs there is an air of robust common sense about Gaultier that runs counter to the preciousness for which the fashion industry is justly notorious. “I do not like the principle that to be fashionable you always have to hate what you have loved before,” he insists. “Like there is some lover you have, and because you have another one you have to hate them. It can happen, of course, but it can be also an accumulation – like a harem!”Gaultier’s creative partnership with Madonna – specifically the sumptuous male harem designs for her Blonde Ambition tour of 1990 – has been well documented, but his encounter with another powerful woman is not such public knowledge Is it true that he once dressed Imelda Marcos? “Yes. I didn’t know at that time exactly who she was, but she had come back from the US with presents for her entourage, she was throwing them into a room and about 30 people were fighting for them.” At that time Gaultier (who was in the Philippines for Pierre Cardin) was not yet trained to do fittings, but he did one for the First Lady.

“I kept saying ‘Raise it here!’, ‘Raise it here!’ And the sewing person had to do it. Imelda looked very bad, but she did not complain – she thought that was how they do it in Paris.”There was a bad time at the start of the Nineties when it looked as though Gaultier might end up in that least desirable of categories, the Eighties leftover. The turn of the decade also brought the awful trauma of his partner of 15 years dying from Aids. But the gently ebullient Gaultier now seems to be working harder than ever. Does he never want to take some time off? “If I stop for one season and there is nothing to present, there are a lot of people who work with me who will be in trouble.” That sounds like a bit of a burden.