On a November morning grey as houses, I crossed a bridge over an expanse of railway tracks leading to the Gare du Nord – or away from it, depending how you look at things. Duran Lantink, the young Dutch fashion designer who last year became the creative director of Jean Paul Gaultier, lives in a cul-de-sac backing on to the train lines. In another part of Paris, architects have designed a public park, the Jardin Atlantique, to sit like a lid over a similar network of train lines and Gare Montparnasse itself, concealing its ugliness. But here in the 18th arrondissement, the tracks bisecting the urban sprawl are part of the neighbourhood’s identity, as are the high, graffitied walls surrounding them, and the construction workers smoking and leaning against the glass front of McDo (as the Parisians call it) in tracksuit bottoms and big North Face puffers, and the man outside the Metro selling blackened corn from a shopping trolley, his face disguised beneath a camo cap. Around the corner is a district called Barbès, after which Jean Paul Gaultier named his most famous collection – autumn/winter 1984-85 – and with which he paid homage to the area’s diversity and chaotic energy. “It’s where I feel the most free,” the designer wrote of the neighbourhood years later.