ASTRO-HOT!
Fashion legend Pierre Cardin designed clothes for the space age
M OST haute couturiers whip up gowns for galas, chic suits for highpowered meetings and tasteful cocktail dresses for ladies’ luncheons. Pierre Cardin makes clothes to wear on the moon.
Those space-age threads — launched in 1964 with his Cosmos collection — included ribbed body stockings and vinyl minidresses worn with silver thighhigh boots, as well as astronaut-inspired helmets, metallic pendants and Plexiglas vests. And, yes, he really did intend them for interplanetary living.
“Like much of the culture, Cardin was obsessed with the space race in the 1960s,” says Matthew Yokobosky, curator of “Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion” at the Brooklyn Museum. But the exhibit, which includes 170 objects spanning seven decades, shows just how far-out Cardin was. He even designed a spacesuit for NASA.
The most avant-garde of the 1960s fashion futurists — who included André Courrèges, Paco Rabanne and Rudi Gernreich — Cardin was also the first couturier to design ready-to-wear, the first to use plastics in his clothes and the first to license his name out for every product under the sun, from cars to furniture to silverware. His sartorial inventions include the “Carwash” dress — a micro mini with dangling loops that resemble the flaps at a car wash — and his own heat-molded, synthetic fabric, called Cardine.
And 50 years after Apollo 11 put the first man on the moon, Cardin is still, at 97, envisioning what the future will look like.
“He still goes into the office every day to sketch ideas,” Yokobosky tells The Post. “He is a trailblazer.”
Cardin was born outside of Venice, Italy, in 1922, but his family moved to France when he was 2. At 14, he apprenticed with a local tailor in Saint-Étienne, and after serving in the Red Cross during World War II, he went to Paris. There, he worked for legendary couturiers House of Paquin, Elsa Schiaparelli and Christian Dior, and even designed costumes for Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film “Beauty and the Beast,” before opening his own atelier in 1949.
His early designs included smart, mod-ish skirt suits favored by Jackie Kennedy and luxurious swing coats with elaborate origami folds. “He was already a master cutter and tailor,” says Yokobosky.
Then came the 1960s: rock ’n’ roll, the sexual revolution, multiculturalism and the space race. Cardin — an avid sci-fi fan since his youth — embraced modernity.
“Fashion was going in two ways — there was a vogue for ethnicinspired fashion in the 1960s, with designers looking to other cultures, like India and China, for inspiration,” says Yokobosky. “And then you had Cardin and Courrèges and Rabanne, who looked beyond — to the future, to outer space.”
Cardin’s groundbreaking 1964 collection envisioned a kind of space utopia, where boys and girls dressed largely the same, in stretchy full-body leotards layered with geometric-printed, bum-grazing tunics, low-heeled boots and metal necklaces and pendants. The clothes — sexy and liberating, easy to move in — caused a sensation. Hip starlets such as Raquel Welch and Jeanne Moreau, as well as The Beatles, sported them, and they became shorthand for “space wear,” inspiring the look of sci-fi shows such as “Star Trek.”
“It was incredibly influential,” says Yokobosky. “The whole idea of unisex dressing and showing men’s and women’s clothing together is one of the biggest trends today.”
Cardin is still pushing boundaries. The exhibit includes recent designs, including his LED-lit “illuminated” ensembles, as well as extravagant ballgowns with flying-saucer tiers. But even his most scandalous archival designs look less shocking in a 21st-century context; a red vinyl pleated skirt set, complete with see-through Plexiglas breast plates, looks almost wearable in the age of Instagram.
“A lot of young women I know looked at it and thought it was totally cool,” says Yokobosky. “It looks like something Lady Gaga would wear.”