Pierre Cardin, designer for the elite and masses , dies at 98

Pierre Cardin, the visionary designer who clothed the elite but also transformed the business of fashion, reaching the masses by affixing his name to an outpouring of merchandise ranging from off-the-rack apparel to bath towels, has died in France. He was 98.

His death was confirmed Tuesday by the French Academy of Fine Arts. He died at the American Hospital in Neuilly- sur- Seine, just outside Paris, his family said, according to Agence France-Presse.

“Fashion is not enough,” Cardin once told Eugenia Sheppard, the American newspaper columnist and fashion critic. “I don’t want to be just a designer.”

He was never just that. He dressed the famous — artists, political luminaries, tastemakers and members of the haute bourgeoisie — but he was also a licensing pioneer, a merchant to the general public with his name on a cornucopia of products, none too exalted or too humble to escape his avid eye.

T here were bubble dresses and aviator jumpsuits, fragrances and automobiles, ashtrays and even pickle jars. Planting his flag on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris, he proceeded to turn the country’s fashion establishment on its head, reproducing fashions for mass, readyto-wear consumption and dealing a blow to the elitism that had governed the Parisian couture.

In a career of more than three-quarters of a century, Cardin remained a futurist.

“He had this wonderful embrace of technology and was in love with the notion of progress,” said Andrew Bolton, head curator at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

As the space age dawned, Cardin dressed men, and women, in spacesuits. In 1969, NASA commissioned him to create an interpretation of a spacesuit, a signal inspiration in his later work.

“The dresses I prefer,” he said at the time, “are those I invent for a life that does not yet exist.”

His designs were influenced by geometric shapes, often rendered in fabrics like silver foil, paper and brightly colored vinyl. The materials would shape the dominant aesthetic of the early 1960s. It was a new silhouette that “denied the body’s natural contours and somehow seemed asexual,” Bolton said.

“His ability to sculpt fabric with an architectural sensibility was his real signature,” he added.

Cardin drew inspiration from everywhere, be it the pagodas he visited in China, op art painting or automotive design.

“I’m always inspired by something outside, not by the body itself,” he told The New York Times in 1985. Clothing, he said, was meant “to give the body its shape, the way a glass gives shape to the water poured into it.”

Yet his men’s ready-towear designs, introduced in 1960, were decidedly more faithful to the body’s outlines. Built on narrow shoulders, high armholes and a fitted waist, they were streamlined and somewhat severe, dispensing in some cases with traditional collars in favor of the simple banded Nehru, a namesake adaptation of the style worn by the Indian prime minister.

Those suits were slow to catch on in the United States — until the Beatles appeared in knockoff versions on the Ed Sullivan television show in 1966. Nehru-mania ensued.

Cardin had laid the foundations for a global empire by the late 1950s. At a time when France was fashion’s uncontested epicenter, he was bringing his designs to Moscow, Tokyo and Beijing, doing more to erode international boundaries than any designer of the day.

In 1957, he became the first to forge business ties with Japan and within two years he was selling his fashions there. He sensed a vast, untapped market for fashionable clothing in Central Europe and Asia, and by the end of the 1960s he was offering his designs for mass production in China. In 1983, Cardin became the first French couturier to penetrate the Soviet Union: His designs were manufactured in Soviet factories and sold under the Cardin label in Cardin boutiques in Moscow.

He conceived of himself above all as a prolific ideas man, relishing his role as the overseer of a realm that encompassed clothing accessories, furniture, household products and fragrances sold through some 800 licensees in more than 140 countries on five continents.

“I wash with my own soap,” he once boasted. “I wear my own perfume, go to bed with my own sheets, have my own food products. I live on me.”

Chocolates, pens, cigarettes, frying pans, alarm clocks and cassette tapes — all bore the Cardin logo, as did shoes, lingerie, blouses, neckwear, wallets, belts and, more recently, an Android tablet. By the mid1980s, Cardin stood at the helm of a marketing organization and network of licensees paying him royalties of 5% to 12%, a stream of income that earned him the unofficial title “the Napoleon of licensors.”

“I was born an artiste,” he told The Times in 1987, “but I am a businessman.”

Not content to preside over an omnipresent global brand, Cardin turned his rapacious attention to theaters and motels, media and even restaurants, in 1981 buying Maxim’s, once the world’s most famous restaurant, a landmark of the belle époque on the Rue Royale in Paris.

Two years later, as part of an international expansion, Maxim’s opened its first branch in Beijing, prompting Cardin to exult, with his sense of a limitless future, “If I can put a Maxim’s in Beijing, I can put a Maxim’s on the moon.”

Artistic ambitions

Pietro Costante Cardin was born July 7, 1922, in San Biagio di Callalta, Italy, near Venice, where his parents were vacationing. He grew up in Saint-Étienne, in east- central France, where his father was a wine merchant.

Pierre’s impatience with convention asserted itself early. In his early teens he deflected his father’s efforts to induct him into the family trade. In deference to his evident artistic ambitions, his parents eventually enrolled him in architectural studies at the school of Saint-Étienne.

Cardin, who was captivated by the worlds of theater and ballet, first dreamed of acting, but was later drawn to designing costumes and sets for the stage.

In 1936, he left for Vichy. By 14, he was assisting a local tailor named Manby. Impatient to embark on a fashion career, he was 17 and preparing to head to Paris when World War II erupted, and he enlisted. During the war he took an administrative position in the French Red Cross, a job he later credited with fostering a latent talent for tallying balance sheets.

He returned to Paris in 1945, intent on establishing himself as a designer. He apprenticed at several prominent fashion houses, among them Paquin and Elsa Schiaparelli. From 1946- 50, he designed coats and suits for Christian Dior. During that period he continued to indulge his passion for theater and cinema, designing costumes, based on the sketches of Christian Bérard, for the Jean Cocteau film “Beauty and the Beast.”

Toward the end of his couture apprenticeship, he alighted on an opportunity to found his own fashion house when a theatrical costumer with an attic workshop in the Madeleine neighborhood shuttered his business. Cardin moved in and began designing under his own name, buying additional floors of the building each year until he owned it in its entirety.

His first collection for the House of Cardin, established in 1950, featured suits and coats modeled in heavyweight wool with emphatic details and the geometric shapes and cutouts that were to become hallmarks of his collections. They included, most memorably, his barrel coat with an oversized wool collar in 1955 and his balloon dresses in 1959.

Defying tradition

In 1958, Cardin was chosen as professor emeritus at Bunka Fashion College in Japan, an association that afforded him the opportunity to forge business relations with the Japanese. On returning to Paris, he created his first ready-to-wear collection, which made its debut in 1959 in the department store Le Printemps.

Cardin’s impetuous departure from couture tradition earned him the ire of his peers and expulsion from the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture Parisienne. But he remained unmoved. Arguing that French manufacturers were already copying his creations, he asked, “Why shouldn’t we run the show?” He was reinstated some years later after other designers began to recognize the potential profitability of ready-to-wear.

In 1960 he defied the Chambre Syndicale once more, designing a men’s ready-to-wear collection of slim-fitted suits. By the mid’60s, he had elongated and slimmed down his men’s silhouette, adding low-slung trousers fitted at the waist and flared at the cuffs. Cardin, whose high-profile clients included Cecil Beaton, Yul Brynner and Gregory Peck, argued that the style “brings out the best in a man’s figure.” During that period, his space-age inflected women’s couture was widely copied, generating knockoffs around the world.

By the late ‘60s, he was offering women trouser suits and maxi skirts.

“The eye is ready for it,” he told Marilyn Bender of The Times in October 1969, “now that pants have been accepted.”

Cardin’s ventures that year extended to automotive designs and home furnishings. A Simca with a Cardin- designed interior was presented at the Paris auto show. He made good on his vow to place the Cardin imprimatur on a total environment, creating a plastic modular desk that could be disassembled and then refit like a puzzle into a cube. A new chair design was made using foam rubber covered in vinyl; it changed, accordion like, from a couch to a child’s chair.

In 1970 he bought a faded Paris nightclub, Théâtre des Ambassadeurs, on the Champs-Élysées, gutting and rebuilding it and turning it into L’Espace Cardin, where he presented his fashions and showed art works, movies and contemporary plays.