How many pop icons would you bother looking up on Google Images? Mr Ed Sheeran? Mr Chris Martin? No, probably not – unless you have a particular thing for checked lumberjack shirts and long-sleeved Gap tees. You don’t? Me neither. Mr David Bowie? Yes, obviously. And Madonna and Lady Gaga, too. It’s a surprisingly – and depressingly – small list. Ziggy’s hot pants, the cone bra, the meat dress – each image is summoned in an instant by the mere mention of the artists’ names.

If style were as central to Mr Bowie’s 1970s golden years as his extraordinary, shape-shifting music, so the following decade was to another musician who married sound to vision with equal originality and elan. Mr Prince Rogers Nelson vies with Mr Bowie for the title of king of the pop chameleons: one minute rocking a look that combines hot pants and thigh-high boots; the next, strutting his stuff in the garb of a Renaissance king (or should that be prince?). Just as his songs – “Little Red Corvette”, “If I Was Your Girlfriend”, “1999”, “I Would Die 4 U”, “Kiss”, “Purple Rain” – liberated us, grabbing us by the crotch as well as the heart, Prince’s look spoke of devil-may-care abandon, of a reckless, mischievous spirit, intent on try-anything experimentation and laughing in the face of conformity. You could do this, too, he seemed to be saying. Well, yes, up to a point. But only Prince could do Prince. And here’s why.

Diminutive celebrities attempting a little elevation in the shoe department usually attract derision. Bono, Mr Tom Cruise, Mr Simon Cowell, ex-French president Mr Nicolas Sarkozy – how we laugh at the sight of their pitiful stacked heels. Prince, on the other hand, seemed balletic rather than pathetic. Prancing round the stage like a horny little faun, executing faultless 360º twirls as he fired out another how-does-he-do-that guitar solo, he used his Cuban heels as pivots, to the point where you swore you saw sparks. Suddenly, he was no longer a 5ft 2in featherweight. He was a love god, in lifts.

Channelling Charles II, Prince took his Purple Rain album on the road in 1984, his brocaded jackets, flowing frills and immaculate lace cuffs conjuring up a bawdy Restoration comedy set to music. His heady flamboyance only heightened the sense of a once-in-lifetime talent, descending from another planet to mess with our heads.

One year later, with Parade riding high in the charts, Prince put the frills into storage, emerging with a barely-there combination of button-studded crop-top and matching trousers, his toned torso to the fore. The message was unambiguously up-for-it: I threw this outfit on in seconds, it purred, and I could throw it off just as fast.

At the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards, His Purple Highness took to the stage in a gold jumpsuit. So far, so Prince, we all thought. A bit daring, certainly, and, yes, anyone else wearing that would have looked like a Teletubby gone rogue. And then he turned round. There they were, open to the elements. A buns bonanza.

A shy and self-effacing man who was a world away from the persona he projected in public, Prince let the mask slip, briefly, in 1995. He might have been wearing a characteristically audacious pink ensemble involving high-waisted slacks topped off with a corset when he took to the stage in London that spring, but there was no mistaking his intent. Locked in a dispute with his record label, he’d chosen the nuclear option. Sharpied onto his right cheek was a single word: “SLAVE”. A protest in pink. How effortlessly cool is that?