There's an important commemoration to celebrate today (anticipated by the previous recap on Space Age designs and inspirations) – the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. There have been many fashion designers in love with the moon and with space, but the first one was Pierre Cardin.
Throughout his collections he explored indeed the Earth, Sun and Moon as portals to infinity and in a 1984 interview with The Sunday Times, he revealed that one of his greatest moments was stepping into a spacesuit like the one that Neil Armstrong wore when he landed on the moon.
If you want to celebrate the lunar landing anniversary and discover more about Cardin's flying-saucer-like dresses, satellite hats, innovative fabrics, and about his passion for futuristic interior design pieces and for houses that looked as if they were part of the set for a sci-fi film, head to the Brooklyn Museum.
The exhibition "Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion" is opening indeed today at the museum (until 5th January 2020); this is the first New York retrospective dedicated to the designer in 40 years.
Curated by Matthew Yokobosky, Senior Curator of Fashion and Material Culture at the Brooklyn Museum, the event features 170 objects that date from the 1950s to the present, including haute couture and ready-to-wear garments, accessories, photographs, film, and other materials drawn primarily from the Pierre Cardin archive.
"Throughout his decades-long career, Pierre Cardin has proved to be a master tailor and designer, as well as an intuitive businessman," states Yokobosky in a press release. "He truly is a twentieth-century renaissance man whose work has advanced fashion and design while continuously giving society a new and breathtaking vision of what the future might look like."
Born in 1922 in San Biagio di Callalta, near Venice, Pietro Cardin moved to France when his family fled from Fascism. During World War II he served in the Red Cross.
He then moved to Paris, worked at Paquin and Schiaparelli's maisons and joined Dior's in 1947. Excelling in mathematics and geometry, Cardin soon showed a special skill for constructing impeccable dresses.
Three years later he founded his own fashion house and rose to fame after launching in 1953 his first collection. The latter featured architectural pieces such a pleated coat that sold very well in the United States and helped him getting noticed by fashion editors such as Carmel Snow and Diana Vreeland.
His fame quickly spread all over the world: in 1957 he went to Japan with news photographer Yoshi Takata and spent a month teaching three-dimensional cutting at Bunka Fashion College (his class included Hanae Mori and Kenzo Takada). In 1958 he launched a ready-to-wear collection at Parisian department store Printemps.
In the following years he introduced experimental shapes and was very influenced by Space Age designs and technology (see the 1964 "Cosmocorps" collection with looks that included vinyl, metallic fabrics and zippers), coming up with dresses and body suits that seemed to echo Star Trek's style, hologram dresses, bubble dresses, and kinetic tunics.
His fashion pieces (among them also unisex designs) fascinated many stars and iconic celebrities, among them Brigitte Bardot, Lauren Bacall, Alain Delon, Jacqueline Kennedy and Raquel Welch.
The designer also invented in 1968 a synthetic fabric dubbed "Cardine" made by molding a bonded, uncrushable Dynel fiber into three-dimensional patterns.
His passion remained the space and the future: in 1969, Cardin took an inspirational trip to NASA, where he became the only civilian in history to wear an original space suit worn by an astronaut.
During the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Cardin continued making clothes often inspired by architectural details or by the design of computers.
He also organised ground-breaking fashion shows at the Great Wall of China (1979; this show featured 300 looks) and in Moscow’s Red Square (1991; attended by over 200,000 people). In the meantime his empire kept on growing: in the late 1960s, Cardin began licensing his own name and a monster-like expansion quickly followed.
Licensing meant money from royalties and with more than 850 licenses, Cardin bought throughout the years the Théâtre des Ambassadeurs in Paris (now Espace Cardin) and Bistro Maxim's; the Palais Bulles and a castle in Lacoste, France. At the moment the company's revenue is still coming from worldwide licenses for products ranging from furniture to fragrances, pens, bags, and even beach umbrellas.
In 2011 it was announced that Cardin wanted to sell the company, but, being quoted at €1 billion and with the designer stating he would have remained at its helm as Creative Director, no powerful fashion groups dared buying it. Today, at the age of 97 Cardin continues to walk to his office and keeps on designing.
The exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum was organised chronologically and divided in 19 section on display among bold and bright Pop Art and futuristic backdrops.
Cardin has always been ahead of his time and that's clear from the titles of the sections - "Twenty-First Century Unisex," "Kinetic," "Licensing," "Democratization and Pluralization," and "New Material and The Visible Invisible," just to mention a few of them.
There are many iconic pieces to rediscover such as his "target dress" from his 1960s "Cosmocorps" collection, his investigations into unisex garment design and trendsetting menswear, such as the slender "cylinder" pants and a wool suit purchased by Jacqueline Kennedy in 1957 and worn three times (it was the look of choice for the Kennedys' first official visit in 1961 to Canada). Fans of futuristic inspirations will love the kinetic dresses, the illuminated clothes, the lenticular printed designs and 3-D molded tunics displayed in front of a giant picture by Terry O'Neill portraying Raquel Welch in a Pierre Cardin outfit featuring a black bodysuit, miniskirt and necklace in blue vinyl, worn with a Plexiglass visor (1970; this is also the picture on the cover of the exhibition catalogue). There are also plenty of accessories on view, including hats, jewelry, shoes, and sunglasses.
Quite a few of the designs on show feature spherical or round forms that will call to mind Pierre Cardin's Palais Bulles, designed by architect Antti Lovag for industrialist Pierre Bernard, and purchased unfinished by the fashion designer Cardin, who called it an "architectural folly".
Fans of fashion and cinema will be able to rediscover clothes made for film and theater, such as the costumes worn by Mia Farrow in "A Dandy in Aspic" (1968) and by Jeanne Moreau.
The French actress met Cardin in the '60s and they had a relationship that lasted around 5 years and she often donned some of his elegant looks in films such as "Eva" and "The Yellow Rolls-Royce". For animation fans there is also a 1963 episode of "The Jetsons" to rediscover, mentioning a Space Age evening gown by "Pierre Martian". Film clips from his famous fashion shows at Espace Pierre Cardin (1970 onward), the Great Wall of China (1979), and Moscow's Red Square (1991) are also featured. While among the highlights of the photographic section there are images of Hiroko Matsumoto, the model who became a muse to Cardin, and photographs of the "Battle of Versailles", the 1973 fashion show that turned into a symbolic duel between American and French designers.
Throughout his career Cardin designed, cut, sew and finished his own clothing, but he also focused on designing furniture, lighting, and automobile interiors.
Quite often there were connections and correspondences between his dresses and jackets and his furniture pieces, as shown in the objects included in the exhibition, while his upholstery, taillights and strip detailing for cars such as the 1972 Javelin, and the Atlantic Aviation's Westwind 1124, inspired different fashion designers throughout the decades (including Miuccia Prada in Miu Miu's Resort 18 collection).
The curator also attempted to put Cardin’s work in a larger historical context, adding footage from early films that tried to portray visions of the future, such as "A Trip to the Moon" (1903) by Georges Méliès, and "Things to Come" (1936) by William Cameron Menzies.
The final aim of the event is to show that Cardin has been a pioneer: today's fashion shows have become moveable feasts, but he was the first to show his collections in India, Japan, China, and Vietnam; he has also been the first to license his name, using it to create a wide range of products on a global scale (bear in mind that licensing his name was an operation criticised by fashion purists, but secretly admired by more commercial fashion houses that struggled to replicate his success).
Cardin also remains the most copied, but rarely acknowledged designer around: if you know Cardin's history, you will indeed spot connections between his designs and a wide range of contemporary pieces and collections by Tom Ford, Thomas Tait, Marc Jacobs, Céline, Comme des Garçons, Alexander McQueen and Miuccia Prada.
More recently there were Cardin's echoes in Maria Grazia Chiuri's designs for Dior's Haute Couture S/S 18 collection, and in Jean-Paul Gaultier's Haute Couture S/S 18 collection (as a young man, Gaultier worked for him as a studio assistant) with one of Gaultier's futuristic designs on the runway dubbed "Cardinella".
A Pierre Cardin's retrospective was therefore due (celebrations may continue in September when the documentary "House of Cardin" directed by P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes should debut at the Venice Film Festival), but scheduling it with the moon landing anniversary was a very clever idea, so well-done to the Brooklyn Museum for organising a stellar retrospective about a man who can proudly state he has owned it all, but nobody owned him. And in the current fashion industry where fashion groups rule, fashion designers are exploited and influencers believe they are creating unique images while they are just being used by brands, that's no mean feat.
Image credits for this post
1. Terry O'Neill (British, born 1938). Raquel Welch in a Pierre Cardin outfit featuring a miniskirt and necklace in blue vinyl, worn with a Plexiglass visor, 1970. Image courtesy of Iconic Images. © Terry O’Neill / Iconic Images
2. Pierre Cardin wearing Apollo 11 space suit, 1969. (Photo: Courtesy of Archives Pierre Cardin. © Archives Pierre Cardin)
3. Pierre Cardin two-tone jersey dresses, with vinyl waders, 1969. (Photo: Yoshi Takata. © Pierre Pelegry)
4. Pierre Cardin "Cardine" dress, 1968. (Photo: Courtesy of Archives Pierre Cardin. © Archives Pierre Cardin)
5. Pierre Cardin minidresses with sculpted bust detail, 1966. (Photo: Courtesy of Archives Pierre Cardin. © Archives Pierre Cardin)
6. Pierre Cardin in his couture salon, 1952. (Photo: Courtesy of Archives Pierre Cardin. © Archives Pierre Cardin)
7. Pierre Cardin in his atelier, 1957. (Photo: Courtesy of Archives Pierre Cardin. © Archives Pierre Cardin)
8. Pierre Cardin wool dress with cutouts, 1971. (Photo: Courtesy of Archives Pierre Cardin. © Archives Pierre Cardin)
9. Pierre Cardin "Cosmocorps" suits and "Porthole" dresses, 1968. (Photo: Yoshi Takata. Courtesy of Archives Pierre Cardin. © Archives Pierre Cardin)
10. Pierre Cardin vinyl eyewear, 1970. (Photo: Courtesy of Archives Pierre Cardin. © Archives Pierre Cardin)
11. Lauren Bacall, Leslie Bogart, and Alain Delon at Pierre Cardin's Fall 1968 fashion show. (Photo: Courtesy of Archives Pierre Cardin. © Archives Pierre Cardin)
12. Pierre Cardin at work, 1968. (Photo: Courtesy of Archives Pierre Cardin. © Archives Pierre Cardin)
13. Pierre Cardin developing his "Computer" coat, 1980. (Photo: Courtesy of Archives Pierre Cardin. © Archives Pierre Cardin)
14. Pierre Cardin dress with kinetic back, 1970. (Photo: Yoshi Takata. Courtesy of Archives Pierre Cardin. © Archives Pierre Cardin)
15. Gloves around the Pierre Cardin "Escargot" logo, mid-1960s. (Photo: Yoshi Takata. Courtesy of Archives Pierre Cardin. © Archives Pierre Cardin)
16. Pierre Cardin at the St. James Theatre, 1977. (Photo: Ivan Farkas. Courtesy of Archives Pierre Cardin. © Archives Pierre Cardin)
17. Pierre Cardin "Computer" coats, 1980. (Photo: Courtesy of Archives Pierre Cardin. © Archives Pierre Cardin)
18. Pierre Cardin “Pagoda” jackets in leather, 1979. (Photo: Courtesy of Archives Pierre Cardin. © Archives Pierre Cardin)
19-28. Installation images, "Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion", Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.
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