Pierre Cardin

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Architecture First, Then the Ateliers of Paris

Cardin's formation began outside fashion. Born near Venice to French parents, he moved to Paris in 1945 and studied architecture — the discipline of geometry, structure and planned space. That training is visible in everything he later became known for: geometric shapes and motifs are an architect's vocabulary applied to cloth. His apprenticeship then ran through the post-war Paris houses in quick succession. He worked with Paquin after the war, then with Schiaparelli, and in 1947 became head of Christian Dior's tailoring atelier, the workshop responsible for structured garments. He was denied work at Balenciaga, a rejection worth noting because it closed the most traditional door in Paris couture and left him to build his own. He founded his house in 1950 and began haute couture in 1953, so by his early thirties he had an architect's eye, a tailor's training and his own couture salon.

Space Age Shapes and the Bubble Dress

The style he built on that foundation was deliberately futuristic. Cardin was known for an avant-garde style and space age designs, preferring geometric shapes and motifs and often ignoring the female form. Ignoring the form is the radical element. Most dress design starts from the body's curves and either follows or reshapes them; a geometric design starts from a shape — a circle, a cone, a trapezoid — and lets the body live inside it. The bubble dress of 1954 is the early, famous result: a skirt that balloons out and is gathered back in at the hem, making a rounded volume that owes nothing to the waist or hips beneath it. He also advanced into unisex fashions, sometimes experimental and not always practical. That qualification matters. Experimental clothing tests an idea at the cost of wearability, and Cardin accepted the trade openly, treating some collections as research into how people might dress rather than as garments for the present season.

The Couturier Who Broke the Rules of Selling

Cardin's second revolution was commercial. In 1959 he became the first couturier to turn to Japan as a high fashion market, travelling there when Paris houses still looked mainly to America and Europe for clients. The same year he was expelled from the Chambre Syndicale, the Paris couture governing body, for launching a ready-to-wear collection for the Printemps department store — the first couturier in Paris to put his name on ready-made clothes sold in a store. The expulsion states the old rule plainly: couture was bespoke, exclusive and salon-sold, and ready-to-wear was considered a betrayal of it. He was soon reinstated, but resigned in 1966 and thereafter showed in his own venue, the Espace Cardin, opened in 1971 in the former Theatre des Ambassadeurs. Owning the venue completed his independence: he controlled the clothes, the price level at which they were sold and the room in which they were seen.

The later record shows how far that independence extended. He was a member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture from 1953 to 1993, yet from 1994 he showed his collection only to a small circle of selected clients and journalists — exclusivity chosen by himself rather than imposed by a governing body. His fellow designer Andre Oliver, who joined him in 1971 and took responsibility for the haute couture collections in 1987, died in 1993. Beyond fashion he bought Maxim's restaurants in 1981 and opened branches in New York, London and Beijing, added Maxim's hotels, licensed food products under the name, and owned the ruined castle at Lacoste once inhabited by the Marquis de Sade, where he held theatre festivals. Whether in restaurants, hotels or a castle, the pattern is the same one he established in 1959: a designer's name treated as something that can be placed on products and places far beyond the couture salon that created it.