Pierre Cardin, Author at Pierre Cardin India

First Pierre Cardin Exhibition for Germany to Open this Week

A Pierre Cardin retrospective opens in Germany this week, the first time the 97-year-old designer has featured in a “solo” exhibition in the country and the latest example of renewed interest in the design icon.

The exhibition, called “Fashion Futurist,” starts Friday at Dusseldorf’s Kunstpalast and includes more than 80 haute couture garments as well as accessories, pictures and films. Items range from those produced in the Fifties right up until 2014. Exhibits will be arranged in four categories: Visionary, Geometric, Young and Glamorous. But there’s also a particular focus on the Space-Age-inspired styles that Cardin was well-known for in the Sixties and Seventies. These include his 1966 Cosmocorps collection and 1968’s sculptural Cardine dresses.

“I was completely captivated by the way he constructed the garments,” one of the exhibition’s curators, Barbara Til, told WWD. “It was all based on geometry and what he did with fabric was amazing.”

Til pointed to what is known as the kimono dress. “It’s basically a large square of fabric that harks back to a Japanese kimono. But when you stretch out your arms, instead of a wonderful dress, you have a Henry Moore sculpture,” she said.

This is why, Til said, Cardin can still be considered to be relevant today. “We don’t realize half of the garments that he popularized. Like the overall,” she noted. “That was considered purely workwear in the 1960s, but he made it into everyday clothing.” Other pioneering looks include the turtleneck sweater for men — all those turtlenecks under suit jackets, as worn by Sixties playboys — and bodysuits for women.

The exhibition came together fairly quickly, Lit explained. Planning started late last year and she and her co-curator, Maria Zinser, were able to source most items from the existing, albeit currently closed, Pierre Cardin museum in Paris (he is in the process of building a cultural center, including a permanent display of his designs, in a former dairy in the town of Houdan, 40 miles west of Paris). One of the major challenges for Lit and Zinser was working out an appropriate setting for the exhibition. “But I think we managed to find the right architect,” Lit said. “Trés Cardin. That’s what Sergio Esposito [Cardin’s head of licensing] said when he saw it,” she boasted.

There have been other Cardin retrospectives lately, including one at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, and Lit thought that Germany had never had one before “because we Germans still argue about whether fashion belongs in a museum.” Lit conceded that her country often has a more conservative approach to clothing. “Although it’s changing slowly, we don’t have such big fashion museums or such well supplied, fashion departments [at existing museums] either,” she added.

As with many other art establishments that have taken to putting on fashion exhibitions, the Dusseldorf institute sees this as a good way of broadening its audience. “For me, it would be great if those who come recognize the beauty of Pierre Cardin’s cutting,” Til said. “It’s very sculptural. And if they see the multifaceted outputs he had, over seven decades in the business.”

The exhibition opens to the public on Sept. 19 and runs until January. To celebrate further, the Kunstpalast will also host Der Super Markt, a sales showcase for around 50 local designers, over the weekend. In typical Cardin style — the Frenchman did almost invent licensing, after all — the museum will also be selling an exclusive Pierre Cardin sweatshirt to commemorate the occasion.

(Source:-wwd.com)

Pierre Cardin’s Space-Age Fashion Takes Us Back to the Future

Our museums, movies and magazines have been on a yearslong binge of ’60s nostalgia, pegged to a rolling sequence of 50th anniversaries: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Neil Armstrong, Woodstock and the Manson murders. It seems Americans can’t get enough of the era, and the optimism that percolated amid great social upheaval. But well beyond our borders, before the 1973 oil crisis tanked the global economy, other countries were partying and protesting just as hard, and a youth culture of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll spanned the globe. This country had no monopoly on grooviness.

“Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion,” now on view at the Brooklyn Museum, offers a swinging reintroduction to Parisian style in the 1960s and 1970s, when the New Look gave way to thigh-high boots and dresses of heat-molded synthetics. The Concorde was flying, Françoise Hardy and Joe Dassin were singing and women (and men) cruised the Left Bank in Mr. Cardin’s stretchy knits and swooping miniskirts.

With 85 ensembles, the earliest dating from 1953 and the most recent from this decade, “Future Fashion” is not, strictly speaking, another ’60s show. But its core are the space-age outfits that Mr. Cardin designed in a young, newly prosperous Paris, seen here on mannequins as well as in photographs and films of Jeanne Moreau, Mia Farrow and the cast of “Star Trek.” Some are chic, many are risible; all of it has an exuberant view of the future that marks it as decidedly from the past.

Mr. Cardin, one of the most commercially successful of all French designers (and still working at 97), was never a great artist in the manner of Christian Dior, Cristóbal Balenciaga and Yves Saint Laurent. Born Pietro Cardin in 1922, he fled with his family from fascist Italy to Vichy, which would become the seat of France’s nominal government in 1940. After the liberation of France, he moved to Paris and apprenticed with the couturier Jeanne Paquin. Later he worked in the studios of Elsa Schiaparelli and Dior, went into costuming and presented his first couture collection in 1953. He won acclaim for his “bubble dresses” (disappointingly absent from this show), cinched at the waist and hem. Here are a beige coatdress of beige bouclé wool, plus a fitted day suit worn by Jackie Kennedy; both have thick roll collars that would become a Cardin signature.

In 1959, Mr. Cardin did something shocking: He mounted a ready-to-wear presentation, at Printemps department store in Paris. It was one of the first by a named designer, and for his effrontery he was kicked out of the French haute couture guild. (He was later readmitted.) But Mr. Cardin was ahead of his time in anticipating the allure of high fashion for the middle classes, enjoying the 30-year postwar boom later christened the Trente Glorieuses.

He masterminded a business approach now gone general: glamorous couture as a loss-leader, ready-to-wear as the profit center and licensing deals to radiate your name worldwide. It made Mr. Cardin rich — he would go on to buy and to franchise the famed Parisian bistro Maxim’s — even as these licensing arrangements left the Cardin brand, stuck onto bottled water and tinned cassoulet, diffuse and cheapened.

Ready to Wear Dresses — Mr. Cardin offered extreme shoulders in this leather jacket (1980) and red wool coat with circular details (1981).Credit…Jonathan Dorado/Brooklyn Museum

Where he excelled was in bold, futuristic day wear, often with unorthodox cuts that reshaped or disguised the body. A pink leather jacket from 1980 has bulging shoulders like the pauldrons of medieval armor; the arms of a wool woman’s suit disguise the wearer’s body with oversized fabric circles. One mannequin sports a brown sweater and paneled skirt as well as a Plexiglas helmet, like a on-trend Apollo astronaut. Mr. Cardin took his space travel seriously: In 1969, he went to Houston and quizzed officials at NASA headquarters about how to stay stylish on the moon.

Like his colleagues André Courrèges and Mary Quant, Mr. Cardin proposed a sleek, forward-dawning fashion that sometimes dissolved gender distinctions — above all in his “Cosmocorps” collections of the mid-1960s, whose zipped sweaters and belted jumpsuits could be worn by men and women. Other outfits from the late ’60s are rather less unisex, like a “porthole” dress with cutout nipples. A man’s jumpsuit of teal wool felt features a leather thong worn over the trousers: one part Superman, two parts Tom of Finland.

Especially when compared to the day wear, most of Mr. Cardin’s evening gowns are tacky and uncreative. He is hung up on stretchy fabrics shaped by stiff hoops; one dress of black jersey incorporates six parallel rings, spaced out from the waist to the feet, that give it the look of a collapsible laundry hamper. None of these ensembles, presented together in a pin-lit gallery meant to evoke a sky full of stars, displays any of the exacting craftsmanship that Issey Miyake or Hussein Chalayan would bring to body-disguising gowns. And only a few, like a “light-up” dress with an LED tube sewn onto the chest, have the daffy futurism of the Cosmocorps.

Remember the future? Most of the clothes in “Future Fashion” were made two decades before I was born, and before our ecocidal species had the full number on the uninhabitable earth that awaits us in the 21st century. In the catalog, Mr. Cardin is asked to imagine what we’ll all be wearing five decades from now, and with a laugh he says, “Women will wear Plexiglas cloche hats and tube clothing; men will wear elliptical pants and kinetic tunics.” A nice vision — yet, as this show affirms, also weirdly retro; that was what we were already wearing 50 years previously, not 50 years hence. I’ve been trying to imagine a more serious future fashion for 2069: cuffed, waterproofed trousers for wading through flooded megacities, maybe, or coverall onesies with holsters for ice packs.

Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion

Through Jan. 5 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn; 718-638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.

Fashion Goes Out of This World

For some designers, space-inspired clothing is the new frontier

‘Space Is the New Black’

Pierre Cardin: Iconic fashion designer honored in ‘Fashion Futurist’ show

The French designer shaped fashion in the 1960s and ’70s with bold colors, futuristic shapes and a daring mix of fabrics. This revolutionary fashion moment is being celebrated in a new exhibition in Düsseldorf.https://www.pierrecardinindia.com/heritage/

Geometric patterns, outsized sunglasses in the shape of bulls eyes, a wild mix of fabrics that include vinyl and plexiglass — the bold look created by Paris fashion designer Pierre Cardin caused a sensation in the 1960s and ’70s.

At the “Pierre Cardin. Fashion Futurist” exhibit that opened this week at Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, more than 80 haute couture dresses and accessories from the French designer’s creative peak are on display.

The show focuses on dresses, boots, glasses, and hats, some of which cover the entire face, leaving only a narrow opening for the eyes. According to the museum, the spectrum ranges from “young, androgynous looks” to “futuristic space-age fashion and the dreamy elegance of evening wear.”

Intergalactic fashion

Cardin created his futuristic look at a time when the first Star Trek episodes hit TV screens.

The use of bright colors, eye-catching cuts, and strong contrasts reflected the intergalactic spirit of the time. The designer’s enthusiasm for astronauts is unmistakable in many of his creations.

Famous actresses including Lauren Bacall, Raquel Welch, and Jeanne Moreau were Cardin fans. Twiggy, a British fashion model, wore Cardin mini dresses in the ’60s, while early Beatles band photos show the Fab Four in his collarless suits.

At the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, the German team showed up in unisex Cardin jumpsuits with cut-outs in the stomach and breast areas.

Clear geometric forms, Cardin’s trademark, made not only for recognizable clothing, but also inspired chunky metal jewelry, buttons, and belts. These forms were reinforced by an unusual mix of different fabrics.

Cardin was especially able to fashion his unique style by cutting fabrics to size on his customers’ bodies, said “Fashion Futurist” curator, Barbara Til.

Still looking ahead

Even at the age of 97, Pierre Cardin is far from considering retirement. Earlier this month, he presented his 2020 Spring/Summer collection in China.

Like in the ’60s and ’70s, the creations are decidedly futuristic. “My favorite clothes are those I create for a life that doesn’t even exist yet — for the world of tomorrow,” Cardin once said.

“Pierre Cardin. Fashion Futurist” runs through January 5, 2020, at Kunstpalast Düsseldorf

(Source:- https://www.dw.com/)

‘House of Cardin’: Film Review | Venice 2019

Directors P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes (‘Mansfield 66/67’) dig into the world of French fashion and design icon Pierre Cardin.

The best documentaries about haute-couture icons, like Valentino: The Last Emperor or last year’s McQueen, combine breathtaking footage of the portrayed designer’s work with a keen sense of who they were as an individual and how they changed their industry. On those terms, House of Cardin, from U.S. directorial duo P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes (Mansfield 66/67), is a success. It premiered in the independent Giornate degli Autori section of the recent Venice fest and should see interest from festivals, broadcasters, and VOD platforms.

Pierre Cardin, born Pietro Cardin in the countryside near Venice in 1922, grew up in France and has become one of that country’s most iconic designers. The film traces his career from his first steps as an employee at Paquin in Paris in 1945, where he was put to work on the exquisite costumes of Jean Cocteau’s classic Beauty and the Beast, to becoming the head of Christian Dior’s atelier and then founding his own eponymous house in 1950.

Through a terrific combination of archival footage and talking-head interviews, Ebersole and Hughes suggest something of the creative genius of Cardin, who freed women from the tyranny of figure-hugging clothes and corsets and whose new ideas about shapes, tissues and colors are still taught in schools today (students at a fashion school in Asia study Cardin during their first year, as shown here).

A lot of his futuristic work from the 1960s and 1970s still looks strikingly modern today and anyone with a passing interest in fashion will recognize quite a lot of what is on display here, though it’s still a thrill to see the stunning range of output over the course of his decades-long career. The filmmakers themselves seem so in thrall of a particular shot of a Chinese model in a white dress with a mile-long crimson red train that unfurls over the top of the Great Wall of China as she moves forward — it is indeed a mouth-agape moment — that they include it in the film several times.

What is perhaps most startling to discover for the regular viewer is how much the global fashion brands of today, such as Louis Vuitton, Dior or Saint Laurent, owe to Cardin as a person and a brand. As the documentary suggests, he was the very first to branch out from haute couture into ready-to-wear — in 1959 he was even thrown out of the French federation for haute couture when he decided to make designer dresses on a budget for the mass market — and also into things such as perfumes, (sun)glasses and ties. Of course, this is how all of the big brands make most of their money nowadays and in retrospect his expulsion seems almost quaint.

Cardin was also the first to branch out internationally, traveling to Japan, China and Russia when those markets were hardly open to any products from the West, so in a way he is not only the father of his own House and of big-brand ready-to-wear items, but also the grandfather of the global fashion world we live in today.

Unlike all the other designers, Cardin, who is now 97, never sold his company to a big conglomerate. A lot of the money he made was invested in new adventures — furniture design, cars, you name it — and in the arts. In 1970, he opened Espace Cardin, a theatre in the former Cafe des Ambassadeurs in Paris, where avant-garde theater and music was programmed. Cardin himself calls them “the authors of tomorrow,” referring to the playwrights, though he might as well have been talking about interviewee Alice Cooper, who also played on the Espace Cardin stage.

In his own theater, Cardin also discovered Gerard Depardieu, who was a stagehand, and told him to get onstage. In 1980, the designer bought the famous restaurant Maxim’s, after having been turned away once for not wearing the proper attire 20 years earlier as Jean-Paul Gaultier recounts here, and turned it into a franchise. And in 2001 he bought the Chateau Lacoste in the Vaucluse region, which housed the Marquis de Sade for several years, and started a much-respected musical drama festival in its stone quarry.

Like the helping hand Cardin got from Dior when he started out, Cardin has in turn become a mentor to many now-famous names, including the aforementioned Gaultier and Philippe Starck, who also appears as a talking head alongside such names as Jean-Michel Jarre and Dionne Warwick, who wore Cardin on the cover of her Make Way for Dionne Warwick album. Sharon Stone and Naomi Campbell also sing his praises, with Campbell underlining the importance of Cardin having women of color on his catwalks years before anyone else did. Indeed, the film appropriately pays homage to Cardin’s face of the 1960s, Japanese model Hiroko Matsumoto.

The footage of Cardin in the present sadly doesn’t amount to much more than a few soundbites and there is a sense that this project represents a bit of a missed opportunity to have this grand monsieur de la mode reflect on his life, work and career in a way that digs a bit deeper. Cardin certainly seems to enjoy being feted everywhere he goes and seen his achievements, that is very much deserved. But it’s a shame editors Mel Mel Sukekawa-Mooring and Brad Comfort have to rely on juicier interviews from yesteryear to shed more light on who the man behind the famous name and signature really was and what drives — or at least drove — him. That said, their cutting is judicious and well-paced throughout, organizing information in thematic blocks while following a roughly chronological order.

The one subject the film doesn’t quite get a handle on is Cardin’s love life, even if it does dedicate some time to both Jeanne Moreau and Andre Oliver, who seem to have been his most important amoureux. Several people from Cardin’s inner circle are interviewed, including his nephew, Rodrigo Basilicati Cardin, the brand’s artistic director; Maryse Gaspard, the director of haute couture; and Renee Taponier, the curator of the Cardin museum. But they either stay mum or only very shyly broach the subject, so the timeline and what exactly happened with Moreau and Oliver — who, it seems, must have overlapped as lovers — remains rather vague. Perhaps, after two fiction films about Yves Saint Laurent, a French director could help figure out what went down between these icons. In archive footage, Cardin suggests that it was actually helpful that Moreau was an icon as well, so they could both leave their public image at the door, the kind of fascinating insight that makes you want to know more about the relationship they had.

Overall, however, this is a deliciously entertaining and perceptive take on Cardin’s life and how he shaped both the silhouette of fashion and branding in the fashion world and beyond. James Peter Moffatt’s pumping score adds a runway vibe that helps keep things lively and moving.

Venue: Venice Film Festival (Giornate degli autori)
Production company: Ebersole Hughes Company
Directors: P. David Ebersole, Todd Hughes
Producers: P. David Ebersole, Todd Hughes, Cori Coppola
Executive producers: Margret Raven, Matthew Gonder
Cinematography: Laurent King
Editing: Mel Mel Sukekawa-Mooring, Brad Comfort
Music: James Peter Moffatt
Sales: Doc & Film International

In French, English, Italian, Chinese, Japanese
97 minutes

(Source:- hollywoodreporter.com)

Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion

Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion is the first New York retrospective in forty years to focus on the legendary couturier. Drawn primarily from Pierre Cardin’s archive, the exhibition traverses the designer’s decades-long career at the forefront of fashion invention. Known today for his bold, futuristic looks of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Cardin extended his design concepts from fashion to furniture, industrial design, and beyond.

The exhibition presents over 170 objects drawn from his atelier and archive, including historical and contemporary haute couture, prêt-à-porter, trademark accessories, “couture” furniture, lighting, fashion sketches, personal photographs, and excerpts from television, documentaries, and feature films. The objects are displayed in an immersive environment inspired by Cardin’s unique atelier designs, showrooms, and homes.

Highlights of Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion include rare designs in luxury fabrics from the 1950s; a large grouping from the landmark 1964 “Cosmocorps” collection, which sought to streamline menswear by eliminating excessive detailing; creations that incorporate vinyls, plastics, and the self-named Cardine synthetic fabric; signature unisex ensembles featuring full knit bodysuits with layered skirts, vests, bibs, and jewelry; iconic broad-shouldered jackets from the 1980s based on Japanese origami, Chinese architecture, and American football uniforms; “illuminated” jumpsuits and dresses; recent couture eveningwear; and an extensive overview of Cardin’s recently designed couture menswear.

Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion is curated and designed by Matthew Yokobosky, Senior Curator of Fashion and Material Culture, Brooklyn Museum.

Leadership support for this exhibition is provided by

Generous support is provided by Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch.

With special thanks to SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film, and SCAD: The University for Creative Careers.

(Source: brooklynmuseum.org)

Author: Pierre Cardin

First Pierre Cardin Exhibition for Germany to Open this Week

A Dusseldorf art museum is hosting a retrospective of the French icon’s work, with a focus on the ever-popular Space-Age looks.

Pierre Cardin’s Space-Age Fashion Takes Us Back to the Future

Pierre Cardin’s Space-Age Fashion Takes Us Back to the Future

Pierre Cardin: Iconic fashion designer honored in ‘Fashion Futurist’ show

‘House of Cardin’: Film Review | Venice 2019

Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion