Although his name had latterly been associated rather with perfumes, accessories and watches than couture, Ted Lapidus had stamped his personality indelibly on the fashions of the 1960s and 1970s, in what is acknowledged by French fashion historians as an “heure de gloire” in the business.

With his unisex and safari suit look he created a style that seemed, with its undeniably impudent swagger, to be of the streets rather than the salon, something that could look as good on the boardwalk as on the catwalk, and on the young of limited means as well as on top models.

Even more astonishingly, in an era which, with the unpopular Vietnam War raging, was — among the young and hip of the Western world at any rate — violently anti-militaristic, he seized upon the military uniform and suddenly made it chic for the fashionable of both sexes. The accoutrements of the military officer, gold buttons and piping, epaulettes, pantaloons, soon became all the rage.

The chanteuse Françoise Hardy was one of the first to embrace the new style, but it also came to sit effortlessly on such a screen icon as Brigitte Bardot herself, and on the aristocratic frame of the Duchess of Bedford. Among the peacocks of the film industry who embraced it enthusiastically were the French screen’s heartthrob Alain Delon and the director Roger Vadim.

All the rules were broken. Jeans could be teamed with outrageously braided military jackets; on women, flowing soldiers’ cloaks would blow aside to reveal the shortest of miniskirts. Much of what appears commonplace on the streets of a new millennium had its origins in the inspiration and daring of Ted Lapidus.

He was born Edmond Lapidus in Paris in 1929, the son of a Russian immigrant tailor. From an early age the world of fashion was his inescapable destiny. But at the outset he realised the vital importance of garment technology as a component of design, and studied Japanese methods from which he learnt the importance of mass production.

After an apprenticeship with Dior, he launched his first couture business in the Rue Marbeuf in Paris with his younger sister Rosette in 1957. The mannequin and singer (and later writer) Annabel Buffet, whose undeniably androgynous air was to become important to his own fashion statement, was one of his first and most conspicuous models.

But it was not until the early years of the 1960s that he really arrived on the scene. The year 1963 was his annus mirabilis. At his first, chaotic, Paris show, with the press so numerous that the proceedings spilled out of the salon on to the pavement, his populist approach to fashion scandalised the high priests of haute couture. And when the Paris department store La Belle Jardinière offered to take and sell his unisex designs by the armful, the perfectionists at first looked down their noses.

But the genie was out of the bottle, and the sheer market success of the new genre was irresistible. Later in the year Lapidus undeniably “came of age” as a couturier with his admission to the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. When the Rue Marbeuf quarters became too cramped for Lapidus’s rapidly expanding operation the business decamped to more spacious accommodation in the Rue François Ier.

By the beginning of the 1980s the character of the business was becoming more international, with diversification and collaboration with other firms in parts of its operations.

In the early years of the decade Lapidus’s son Olivier succeeded his father as artistic director of the House of Lapidus, presenting his first haute couture collection in 1989. In 1995 Jacques Konkier, who already held the licence for “Parfums Ted Lapidus” acquired the entire operation.

Ted Lapidus retired to the French Riviera where he had lived for the past 15 years. Latterly he had suffered from leukaemia, and he died in hospital in Cannes.

Ted Lapidus, fashion designer, was born on June 23, 1929. He died in hospital of respiratory problems on December 29, 2008, aged 79