Jean Paul Gaultier has always been a step ahead of his time, so it comes as little surprise when it emerged this month that he was preparing for his burial.

It will be in PèreLachaise in Paris, perhaps Europe’s best-known cemetery, where Chopin, Delacroix, Proust and Oscar Wilde lie.

The fashion designer has renovated a white stone tomb for himself and his family – a move that will help to seal his place in French history.

Few would dispute his right to rest among the great and good in PéreLachaise, even though his reputation took a battering yesterday when Hermès, the luxury goods group, cut its sales target.

The group said that Gaultier’s designs had failed to protect it from the downturn, which was dimming its revenues and outlook.

So has the magic of the superstar couturier worn thin? Detractors say that he is getting his comeuppance for turning his back on his rebellious past to join the upmarket Hermès label in 2003.

The bonds between the former punk icon and the elitist enterprise were strengthened this year when Hermès paid more than €3 billion (£2.4 billion) to increase its stake in Jean Paul Gaultier’s own business to 45 per cent.

His supporters dismiss the criticism and it shows Gaultier’s ability to reinvent himself. Having grown up in a suburban council flat in Paris, the son of an accountant and a canteen assistant, he joined the Pierre Cardin fashion house at 18 to fulfil a consuming teenage passion for fashion.

Six years later the designer staged his first show in Paris.

It was a flop but within a decade his kilts and corsets had turned him into the enfant terrible of French fashion.

He challenged taboos by using older men and tattooed women as models, and provoked scandal when he designed the clothes for Madonna’s Blond Ambition Tour in 1990, including the celebrated cone bra. That year he lost Francis Menuge, his partner, associate and the man he had described as the love of his life, to an Aids-related illness.

But his empire continued to expand as film-makers such as Luc Besson called on him to make costumes.

His perfume collection includes bestsellers such as Le Male, and his role in Eurotrash, the Channel 4 show that he co-hosted in the early 1990s, brought him media fame in Britain.

Friends say that it will take more than a recession to knock Gaultier, 56, off his pedestal.