AFTER one of designer Gareth Pugh's loftier flights of creativity in 2005, a plucky young model with a soft spot for the British fashion wunderkind was asked to sign a ''death waiver'' to walk in his show. Which she did.

Pugh had incorporated the same flash-and-blip technology used to light up mobile phone screens into the luminous, waved frock-coat design the girl was assigned to wear. The result was revolutionary, and gob-smackingly lovely, but included a small problem. Its tangled web of off-catwalk powerlines posed a risk of ''electrical accident''.

''Basically, it was a phosphorescent powder, screen printed onto plastic in one of my geometric patterns, and then laminated,'' explains Pugh from Paris. ''When an electrical current was passed through the plastic, the design illuminated.''

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The stunt, by fashion's fastest evolving ''next big thing'' at the time (one of the inflatable short wedding dresses , balloon-like garments from his graduate collection at London's infamous Central St Martins College in 2003 had already featured on the cover of cult magazine Dazed and Confused and generated global interest) thankfully elicited only pleasant shocks - not the 240-volt kind. The girl lived to strut another day and the young Pugh's show was hailed another prelude to future greatness. Which it was. Just six years on, Pugh is one of the world's five ''most important design thinkers'', according to organisers of Melbourne's State of Design Festival (July 25-29).

They have invited him to appear in one of a series of Skyped discussions entitled

''9 to 5'' at the Wheeler Centre. Nine top local designers in the fields of fashion, graphic design, education, interior and industrial design and architecture, will lead the talks with questions to Pugh and, over five evenings, five other ''design thinkers''. Audience tickets can be booked now.

Pugh's mind-bending designs have been commissioned by Kylie Minogue, Lady Gaga and Beyonce as stage costumes (he scored his first costume commission at 14, for the British National Youth Theatre) and his ''straight'' fashion shows are among the most eagerly watched.

During the next few years after that ''death waiver'' show, prom dress dresses for summer the lanky, soft-spoken English lad cocktail wedding dresses , 29, lorded over a memorably original series of catwalks at London, then Paris Fashion Weeks. With every one, he added another layer to his distinctive, neo-gothic - some described it as ''apocalyptic' - aesthetic. From his studio, his ''playground'', he invented clothing and costumes that, with swollen, heavily structured and patterned silhouettes projecting beyond the body line, often materialised what he calls ''the shapes that exist in the space around the body''.

Inevitably, his designs have also been accused of being nonsensical: inspired but stupid, arresting but unwearable. Nobody, however, has argued that they are not original. But critics have also tended to confuse his showpieces and shock-value catwalk styling with attempts at rackable ready-to-wear. His early styling, for example, often involved blacking out or rebuilding models' face and hair with masks and headpieces. For autumn 2008 he encased one girl's head in an oblique black box, her draped dress carved into the waist, shredded tendrils flying dramatically from its sleeves. Another model's mini dress was ''boxed'' around her hips, waist and shoulders.

Pugh also showed voluminous, sunray pleated, floor-sweeping culottes for men which were arrestingly odd in 2007, but lingered long enough in the Zeitgeist to manifest among mainstream womenswear trends. His latest collection, for European autumn/winter 2012 shown at Paris Fashion Week in March, is probably his most wearable: sharp/soft angular silhouettes of draped, black quilted leather, often with muted metallic striping. Lady Gaga appeared in an E! News television interview in a red striped version of one of the fastidiously constructed peak-shouldered jackets from the collection. You could say she chose Pugh's jacket to project a more ''casual'' than exotic, stage-worthy look.

That says it all.