Designer’s youthful and futuristic clothes led haute couture into the modern age
Pierre Cardin, who has died aged 98, founded the clothing and consumer goods empire that bears his name and was credited with moving French haute couture away from stuffy exclusivity and into youth-oriented ready-to-wear and unisex designs.
Trained at Dior, Cardin founded his Paris fashion house in 1950 and launched his own haute couture collections in 1953. His geometric motifs, ‘‘bubble dresses’’ and ‘‘cocoon coats’’ took the fashion world by storm. In the 1960s, along with Paco Rabanne and Andre Courreges, Cardin designed futuristic space-age clothes worn by everyone from the Beatles
(whose collarless suits he inspired) to Jackie Onassis and Marlene
Dietrich, and he was credited with innovations ranging from stretch jersey and hotpant suits to the kipper tie.
Until Cardin arrived on the scene, high fashion had been the domain of a privileged few. When, in 1959, he opened a pret-a-porter boutique in Paris department store Au Printemps, there was uproar.
It became part of the Cardin mythology that he was expelled from the Chambre Syndicale, the governing body of haute couture, for his presumption. The reality was that he left of his own accord to break the chamber’s embargo on press coverage.
He was miles ahead of his time in business matters, too. In the early 1960s he secured the first licence deal for men’s shirts and ties, followed in 1968 by the first non-fashion licence – for crockery – ushering in a new era of ‘‘designer’’ lifestyle goods. He was the first to recognise the importance of the post-war Japanese market, showing a collection there in 1958; in 1978 he became the first designer to show in China, opening the way to amarket that keeps the fashion industry afloat today.
Cardin’s rambling empire grew to embrace everything from magazines, theatres, the Maxim’s chain of restaurants, hotels, travel agents and speciality food shops to furniture, frying pans, curtain rods, floor tiles, orthopaedic mattresses, Taiwanese-made key rings and even sardines and chocolate.
Cardin himself remained the guiding force behind the enterprise for more than 60 years, but the diversity of his business interests led to criticism that he had devalued his own name by endorsing goods that tarnished his mystique. By the 1980s his catwalk shows were no longer essential viewing and in fashion circles he had come to be regarded as yesterday’sman.
Cardin remained unrepentant, as befits a man who had risen from nothing to build a billion-dollar empire, and lived a life devoted to the megalomaniac trappings of personalised excess.
Interviewers were struck by Cardin’s phenomenal energy but also by an overwhelming need to prove himself, which allowed little room for conversation that did not concern his own greatness: ‘‘I can wake in the morning and shave with one of my razors, use my own aftershave and dress in Pierre Cardin from my tie to my pants to my shirt. Then I can go to my Pierre Cardin restaurant – Maxim’s de Paris – or go tomy Pierre Cardin theatre. Everything in my house is Pierre Cardin too – even what I eat because I have a range of food products and drinks too,’’ Cardin explained.
This was, it was suggested, a response to the humiliations of his early years. He was born Pietro-costante Cardin near Venice, the youngest of 11 siblings. His father, once awealthy wine merchant and landowner of French descent, had lost everything in World War I, and when Pietro was 4, the impoverished family moved to France.
By the time he was 14 Pietro was called Pierre and had taken French citizenship. Boys at school teased him, calling him ‘‘Macaroni’’ because of his Italian accent. He learned accounting with the Red Cross before becoming an apprentice tailor, eventually moving to Paris in 1945. There, he landed jobs
‘‘I have slept with women. I have slept with men. I am a free man.’’
Pierre Cardin in his 80s
with the couture designers Jeanne Paquin, then Elsa Schiaparelli, sewed Christian Berard’s costumes for Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film La Belle et la Bete, before moving on to Christian Dior.
He set up his own Paris fashion house in 1950, and launched his own haute couture collection in 1953, acquiring celebrity clients including Eva Peron and Rita Hayworth.
As the Sixties dawned, his futuristic designs tuned into the optimistic and socially egalitarian mood, reflected in his classless purity of line, the geometric shapes and silhouettes that he fabricated from jersey and hi-tech fabrics such as vinyl, Perspex, and a fabric called ‘‘Cardine’’.
By the time his stylised, sculptural confections fell out of favour in the 1970s his licensing concerns had taken over. He had begun to diversify because his clothing was so ahead of its time that he felt the need to provide a suitably futuristic environment within which it could be worn. By 2000 his empire spanned nearly 100 countries, employing more than 200,000 people.
Cardin invested some of the proceeds in a chain of 32 homes, including Palais Bulles (Bubble Palace), a villa near Cannes with room for 850 guests, constructed of a riot of dark red bubbles tumbling down the hillside.
Neighbours who objected to having something they regarded as amonstrosity built on their doorsteps were briskly brushed aside: ‘‘Those trapped bourgeoisie will never understand my creativity,’’ said Cardin.
Many enterprises flopped: he bought Maxim’s in 1981 but its worldwide expansion was not a success. In 1970 he opened Espace Cardin, a theatre in Paris appropriately decked out in futuristic style, but at one stage it drained away so much money that Cardin summoned the licensees and told them to pay six months’ revenues in advance.
Cardin was also said to be a poor payer and to be mean-spirited to his staff, while the true state of his finances was shrouded in mystery. For at least 30 years, no executive at Pierre Cardin’s ever saw a budget or a business plan.
Cardin, who was made a Chevalier of the Legion d’honneur in 1983, and was amember of the Academie Francaise, was single, childless and cagey about the precise details of his love life: ‘‘I have slept with women,’’ he said in his eighties. ‘‘I have slept with men. I am a free man. I amvirile. I have been loved, adulated, and desired by extraordinary people.
‘‘What can I say? It would certainly be sad if I had reached this age without having a few histoires d’amour.’’ –