But here’s the clincher. Starck, as you will have grasped by now, is very self-aware. So how about this aphorism? “I create things with which I surround myself, and which allow me to exist. When I stop producing, I will disappear.”

Well, that’s it, then. Like those creepy actors who have no personality apart from the roles they assume, Starck confesses he has no existence beyond the things he creates. That is why he cannot bear a straight photo - he has to make the photo into a designed object in itself, putting an additional filter between himself and his audience. Similarly at his recent Pompidou Centre exhibition in Paris, where (oh, the irony) there were no Starck objects to be found. Instead, you got a roomful of three-dimensional projected heads of Starck, talking. And talking. And talking. Never a pause. He talked about his designs, which flashed up on plasma screens above each of the many heads (each wearing an imperial wreath, by the way). Even the chairs you sat on to watch these presentations were not by Starck. They were generic old wooden café chairs, seemingly placed at random. But if you tried to move one, you found it was fixed to the floor. Starck likes to be in control.

“Roll up, roll up, roll up!” shouted a circus ringmaster on another screen at the entrance to the curtained chamber. “There’s nothing to see, everything to understand!” In fact, there was nothing to understand, either. Except something about the nature of a supreme ego at work. I’ll say this: you came away from the show shaking your head in disbelief, but with a grudging respect for the man. He’s the ringmaster, all right. He holds the world in thrall. And not just the world of design groupies, not just museum curators, but developers, industrialists, company directors. Starck’s designs might not always sell, but when he hits the spot, they sell and sell and go on selling.