The Fine Arts Academy announced yesterday that fashion designer Pierre Cardin, one of its members since the early '90s, had died at 98.
Together with André Courrèges and Paco Rabanne, Pierre Cardin was considered in the '60s at the forefront of Space Age fashion.
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, a first step towards what in our times has been called "fashion democratisation" that shocked Paris' fashion elite at the time.
In the following years he introduced experimental shapes and was very influenced by Space Age designs and technology. His 1964 "Cosmocorps" collection included for example designs made with vinyl and metallic fabrics, and he started creating dresses and body suits that seemed to echo Star Trek's style.
His fashion pieces (among them also unisex designs), often modelled by his muse Hiroko Matsumoto, 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 passions 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. In 1973 he took part in the so-called "Battle of Versailles", a fashion show that turned into a symbolic duel between American and French designers.
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 with worldwide licenses for consumer products ranging from furniture to fragrances, from pens and bags to bed sheets, alarm clocks and even beach umbrellas.
Critics accused him of being a sell-out, but this business operation was secretly admired by more commercial fashion houses that struggled to replicate his success.
Licensing meant money from royalties and with more than 850 licenses, Cardin bought the Théâtre des Ambassadeurs in Paris (now Espace Cardin) and Bistro Maxim's; the extraordinary Palais Bulles, designed by architect Antti Lovag for industrialist Pierre Bernard, and purchased unfinished by Cardin (who called it an "architectural folly"), and a castle in Lacoste, France.
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.
Cardin created throughout the decades many iconic designs, from the "target dress" from his 1960s "Cosmocorps" collection to kinetic dresses, illuminated clothes, lenticular printed designs, dresses with plastic hoops that designed flying saucer-like geometries at the waist, elbows, wrists and knees, bubble dresses and capes tracing spherical shapes around the body of the wearer, and 3-D molded tunics; from his investigations into unisex garment design and trendsetting menswear, to the two-piece day suit comprising a pencil skirt and jacket in red wool twill purchased by Jacqueline Kennedy in 1957 that became the look of choice for the Kennedys' first state visit in May 1961 to Canada, a stylish and formal suit that complemented the uniforms of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
The designer also created garments for singers and bands like The Beatles and Dionne Warwick (who wears a Pierre Cardin gown with jet crystals on the cover of her 1964 album "Make Way for Dionne Warwick"), and film and theater costumes. He started when he first helped Jean Cocteau with the costumes for the 1946 film "Beauty and the Beast" and then continued with the costumes for some episodes of "The Avengers" series, for Mia Farrow in "A Dandy in Aspic" (1968) and for Jeanne Moreau.
The French actress met Cardin in the '60s and they had a relationship that lasted around 5 years: she often donned some of his elegant looks in films such as "Eva" and "The Yellow Rolls-Royce". Cardin was so famous in the '60s that he got a mention even in cartoons: in an episode of "The Jetsons" from 1963, one of the characters wears a Space Age evening gown by "Pierre Martian".
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, 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 including Miuccia Prada in Miu Miu's Resort 18 collection.
Cardin also remains the most copied, but rarely acknowledged, designer in the history of fashion: 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, Miuccia Prada and JW Anderson, who has often moved from Cardin's beloved circle to build the patterns for his designs.
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".
Last year the Brooklyn Museum organised an exhibition about him, "Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion". The first New York retrospective dedicated to the designer in 40 years, the event featured 170 objects that date from the 1950s to the present, while the documentary "House of Cardin" directed by P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes was premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2019 (in Venice there is still a Pierre Cardin Creative Space where it is possible to rediscover his designs).
There are questions, doubts and dilemmas about the future of his brand and of his licences: a man who owned it all, even though nobody owned him, Cardin leaves his fortune to his nephew Rodrigo Basilicati (Cardin didn't have any kids and his long-term business partner and life partner, French fashion designer Andre Oliver, died in 1993). So it will be interesting to see what will happen to the house that Pierre Cardin, visionary designer of the Space Age and branding pioneer, built.
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