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BERLIN — “Who is in charge of the feathers?” the designer Jean Paul Gaultier shouted on a July day as about 20 people scurried around him in the costume workshop at the Friedrichstadt-Palast theater.

Mr. Gaultier stood behind a dancer wearing a bodysuit of fake tattoos under a rhinestone-encrusted bikini, from which bulged a prosthetic pregnant belly ringed in multicolored feathers.

Once the feather issue had been resolved (with flesh-colored tulle), another dancer entered, wearing nothing but black stilettos and a skin suit padded to give her a Kardashianesque physique. She wore a prosthetic head with long shiny black hair and a stunned, expressionless face resembling that of an inflatable doll or a casualty of excessive Botox. Gripping the sides of her thighs, the dancer stretched the “skin” outward like the webbed wings of a bat. Mr. Gaultier looked pleased.

The outfits were among more than 500 costumes that Mr. Gaultier has designed for “The One,” a Las Vegas-style revue featuring song, dance, special effects and acrobatics that opens on Oct. 6 (previews start on Thursday) at the 97-year-old theater in the Mitte district.

Since introducing his first collection in 1976, Mr. Gaultier, now 64, has become one of the most influential and celebrated figures in the world of fashion, all the while pushing its boundaries. He has designed for film, stage, runway and retail; hosted a hit television show; released a dance album; introduced best-selling fragrances; and helped shape the visual identities of numerous pop stars — most notably Madonna, for whom he designed the cone bra and corsets she and her dancers wore on her “Blond Ambition” tour in 1990.

But Mr. Gaultier said he had always dreamed of designing for a revue ever since watching a broadcast of a show at the Folies Bergère on his grandmother’s television as a small boy.

“It was with the feathers on the head, the fishnets, the Swarovskis shining and glittering,” Mr. Gaultier said over lunch after the fitting in the sky lounge of the Friedrichstadt-Palast. “I saw it and I thought: ‘Oh my god, that’s incredible! I want to do something like that!’”

In November 2014, shortly after he announced he was shutting down his ready-to-wear business to focus on couture and other projects, Mr. Gaultier accompanied a longtime friend, the French disco queen Amanda Lear, to the debut of “The Wyld,” a revue here directed by his fellow French designer Thierry Mugler.

Mr. Gaultier was mesmerized by the show — the costumes, the choreography, the pyrotechnics, the scale. Afterward, he walked up to the theater’s general director, Berndt Schmidt, and asked if he could design the costumes for a future production.

“It’s the first time in my life that I’ve said, ‘Oh, in case you are interested, I should love to do it,’” said Mr. Gaultier. “Normally I don’t sell myself.”

“The One” does not have an explicit narrative structure. It depicts an underground party that awakens the ghosts of an old Berlin theater through the lavish visions of one partygoer. Mr. Gaultier found this premise ideal for exploring his own aesthetic vision, and the show features many of the sartorial tropes that earned him the long-held title of fashion’s enfant terrible, including tattoos, graffiti, body modification, androgyny, fetish wear and punk.

Men wear bondage straps and studded feathered headdresses. There are conjoined women with two heads and three breasts, and characters based on gender-blurring icons like Divine and Klaus Nomi.

“I always loved the people that were underground,” Mr. Gaultier said. “I don’t think I was an underground person, but I always was fascinated by difference, by different beauty. High society, that kind of thing, it’s not inspiring to me.”

The production, which cost 11 million euros, about $12.4 million, will feature more than 100 performers on a stage billed as the largest in the world, which for “The One” has been transformed into a vast body of fluorescent water.

“It’s like the biggest Jean Paul Gaultier catwalk ever,” Roland Welke, the show’s writer and director, said between rehearsals a few weeks before the opening.

Mr. Gaultier created the hundreds of outfits for “The One” over a 10-month period together with the Friedrichstadt-Palast costume department, which employs about 55 tailors, shoemakers, milliners, makeup artists and assistants, as well as about 20 external ateliers. They created more than 50 new fabric patterns (eight tattoo prints alone) and used a rainbow of fabrics and materials, including silk, leather, chiffon, mesh and nearly 150,000 Swarovski jewels. (Mr. Gaultier designed a collection for Swarovski last year.)

Mr. Gaultier said he took inspiration from Berlin, a city he has visited often over the last three decades. For the opening club scene, he drew in particular from numerous visits to Berghain, a techno club in a former power plant in the Friedrichshain district.

“It’s a little like when I was going to Studio 54 and the Roxy in New York, in Paris the Palast, in London the Heaven,” Mr. Gaultier said. “A mecca, a big, big mixed crowd — and the music is fantastic.”

The theater itself was another inspiration, Mr. Gaultier said. The Friedrichstadt-Palast traces its roots to a 19th-century circus that in 1919 became the Grosses Schauspielhaus, or Great Theater, under the leadership of Max Reinhardt, the German-Jewish impresario.

Revues at the theater featuring Jazz Age stars like Marlene Dietrich and Erik Charell helped to shape the popular image of the Roaring Twenties. In 1933, the Nazis renamed it the Theater des Volkes, or Theater of the People.

After World War II, the theater became the Friedrichstadt-Palast and was used for variety shows, moving to its current location in 1984.

The theater’s reputation languished in the 1990s and 2000s, but since taking over as general director in 2007, Mr. Schmidt has tried to remake its image, pulling in big names like Mr. Mugler, Christian Lacroix and now Mr. Gaultier. The Friedrichstadt-Palast has doubled its revenue, and the average age of its audience has dropped to 38.5 from 54, theater officials said.

“I wanted to bring the revue as an art form into the 21st century,” said Mr. Schmidt, who had previously worked for the media conglomerate Bertelsmann. “In the ’20s, the revue was state of the art. Women went to the theater to see what to wear, to find out what’s en vogue.”

“Jean Paul, he’s not just a fashion designer — he’s an artist,” he added.

Mr. Gaultier said working on a grand scale allowed his imagination free rein.

“What I do in fashion, it’s the same thing here,” he said. “But I can take everything one step further.”