You’ll know the lemon squeezer. It’s called “Juicy Salif”, is made of polished aluminium, and looks a lot like a cross between a spider and a Tintin moon rocket. Designed in 1987, it became a symbol of the loft-living generation. Nobody uses a Starck lemon squeezer: people just have them standing about. Like his “Hot Bertaa” kettle of the same year, which looks great but is almost impossibly awkward to use. But the inventive M. Starck refused to disappear after the late Eighties boom turned to bust, along with the pay packets of the yuppies who bought his stuff. Starck never went away. Starck started designing buildings, motorcycles, bathroom fittings, boats, clothes, everything.

I’m trying hard to think of something that the man and his enormous office has not designed. Maybe not yet a train. Maybe not yet a tampon. I check his website. Indeed, no trains or tampons are mentioned in the quite staggeringly long list of commissions - or rather, 12 separate lists. But he’ll no doubt get round to them eventually. It might seem like he’s been around forever, but he’s still only 54. And girls, he knows all about you. “I have always been highly aware of concerns that are strictly speaking feminine. In fact, this sensitivity is my most important resource,” he declares, or rather declaims. Declamation is his style. Getting in touch with his feminine side yielded the garment known as “StarckNaked”, intended as simultaneously a dress, skirt and hosiery in various colours, made of elasticated nylon. “Down with the fashion victimhood and brand slavery that keep women from blossoming and simply being themselves!” he burbled. Wolford made StarckNaked briefly in 1998. Women in their hundreds of millions omitted to buy it.

The website, by the way, you should take a look at. It is full of pictures of Starck striking larky poses. That’s the only kind of self-portrait he does. The man can’t just have a photo taken, no: he has to act. Starck clowns around. His whole attitude to work and life could be summed up in that eloquent French ejaculation - Bof!

Here’s a photo of Philippe in a plaid shirt and Napoleonic hat, shouldering a human thighbone. There’s one of him with his head on back to front. There’s one of him dressed up as one of his buildings. Another of his naked torso (he’s fond of showing us that) covered in doodles. And with these images come slogans. “We are God” is one. Another, fairly revealing, goes: “You wanna talk design? I hate that. You might as well go home. La la la la la.”