2021 JANUARY
PAYING OUR HOMAGE
TO
PIERRE CARDIN
July 22, 1922 to December 29, 2020
Written by Andrew Sia
Pierre Cardin is known to have democratized high fashion with his ready-to-wear label “Pierre Cardin” and he was known to say that he didn’t want only the rich people to wear fashionable clothes. Instead of being copied, he preferred to copy himself. At his peak of his career, there were 800 licenses in his name, and now there are still about 350 which is a lot.
Shall we say that he was the first socialist in fashion—by democratizing access to it—and yet his business approach was unashamedly capitalist.
I would like you to refer to the following for the milestones that Pierre Cardin has achieved in his lifetime:
It was in our April 2019 issue we quoted one of Pierre Cardin’s quotes: “Talents are not enough. Only styles count”.
He was born in 1922 outside Venice and was the youngest of 10 siblings. He studied architecture in Saint-Étienne and went to Paris in 1945 to work in the haute ateliers of Paquin, Elsa Schiaparelli and Christian Dior. He helped to sew the dresses that became the basis of the revolutionary “New Look” which brought Paris to its position as the capital of the fashion world after WWII. Dior gained prominent customers from Hollywood, USA, and aristocrats from Europe.
Pierre Cardin was also known as the father of 1960s futurism—avant-garde style, space-age designs.
But at one point his willingness to put his name almost on anything was devalued by overexposure. It was in the 1980s I could notice that the Indian market was licensing his name for almost everything.
He became the first designer to go to Japan in 1959. This was followed by China in 1978 and Russia in 1987. He was also the first to let his name to be used in china, ballpoint pens and caviar. You can find his name in hotel, restaurant, cinema, and not just fashion.
His once assistant Jean Paul Gaultier, quoted that with Pierre Cardin he could make a hat from a chair that tells you how talented he was.
You can read what I wrote about Pierre Cardin in our April 2019 issue. It was no question that Pierre Cardin always did things before the others.
This picture was taken on January 28, 1996 in Residence de Maxim when my wife Mimi ran into Pierre Cardin during one of our stays there. Every now and then he would walk in the hotel lobby to greet his guests to make the stay more amicable. He was really a very good businessman.
