Pierre Cardin, the visionary designer and licensing pioneer who invented the fashion business as it is conducted today, has died. He was 98 years old.
His death was confirmed on 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 fashion columnist and newspaper columnist. “I don’t want to be just a designer.”
It was never just that. He dressed the famous – artists, political luminaries, opinion leaders and members of the upper bourgeoisie – but he was also a mass merchant with an international brand, his name affixed to a torrent of products, neither too excited nor too humble to escape his. greedy eye.
There were bubble dresses and bath towels, aviator and automobile coveralls, fragrances and ashtrays, even pickle jars. Putting his flag on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, in Paris, he turned the country’s fashion establishment upside down, reproducing fashion for mass consumption and ready to wear and giving a blow to the elitism that ruled haute couture Parisian.
In a career spanning more than three-quarters of a century, Cardin has remained a futurist. “He had this wonderful technology embrace and was passionate about the notion of progress,” said Andrew Bolton, chief curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
In 1958, Cardin put on models with helmets combined with tiny skirts and colorful socks. He dressed men and women in space suits. In 1969, NASA commissioned him to create an interpretation of a space suit, a sign inspiration in his later work. “The dresses I prefer,” he said at the time, “are the ones I made up for a life that doesn’t yet exist.”
Their designs were influenced by geometric shapes, often reproduced on man-made fabrics such as silver foil, brightly colored paper and 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 looked asexual,” Bolton said.
“His ability to sculpt fabrics with architectural sensibility was his true signature,” he added.
Mr. Cardin was inspired everywhere, be it the pagodas he visited in China, Op Art painting or automotive design.
“I am always inspired by something external, not by the body itself,” he told The New York Times in 1985. Clothes, he said, were made “to shape the body, like a glass shapes the water poured into it. “
However, his ready-to-wear male designs, introduced in 1960, were decidedly more faithful to body contours. Built on narrow shoulders, high armholes and a tight waist, they were aerodynamic and somewhat severe, dispensing in some cases the traditional collars in favor of the Nehru with simple bands, a homonymous adaptation of the style used by the Indian Prime Minister.
These lawsuits took a long time to pick up in the United States – until the Beatles appeared in fake versions on the Ed Sullivan television show in 1966. Nehru-mania followed.
Mr. Cardin had laid the foundation for a global empire in the late 1950s. At a time when France was the undisputed epicenter of fashion, he was bringing his designs to Moscow, Tokyo and Beijing, doing more to erode borders international than any designer at the time.
In 1957, he became the first to establish commercial ties with Japan and, in 1959, he already sold his fashion there. He realized a vast and untapped market for trendy clothing in Central Europe and Asia and, in the late 1960s, was offering his designs for mass production in China. In 1983, Cardin became the first French couturier to enter the Soviet Union: his designs were manufactured in Soviet factories and sold under the Cardin label at Cardin boutiques in Moscow.
Above all, he saw himself as a prolific man of ideas, savoring his role as supervisor of a kingdom that encompassed clothing accessories, furniture, household products and fragrances sold by about 800 licensees in more than 140 countries on five continents.
Chocolates, pens, cigarettes, frying pans, alarm clocks and cassette tapes – all had the Cardin logo, as well as shoes, lingerie, blouses, ties, wallets, belts and, more recently, an Android tablet. In the mid-1980s, Mr. Cardin was at the head of a marketing organization and network of licensees paying royalties of 5 to 12 percent, a stream of income that earned him the unofficial title “the licensors’ Napoleon” .
“I was born an artist,” he told The Times in 1987, “but I am an entrepreneur.”
A complete obituary will appear soon.