Pierre Cardin was born in san Biagio di Callata, near Venice. His parents were French. Cardin was brought up in St. Etienne in the Loire region. At the age of seventeen he left home to work for a tailor in Vichy, where he began making suits for women. Cardin went to Paris where, one year later, he found work with Parquin and Schiaparelli. He met Christian Berard and Jean Cocteau and made the costumes for Cocteau’s film „Beauty and the Beast“(1947). Cardin also worked for Dior. He began producing theatrical costumes in 1949. In the following seven years he got a good name in his branch as a maker of men’s suits and a designer of extravagant and fantastic costumes. After this period he opened a small shop for his own menswear and womenswear. He produced his first women’s collection in 1957, followed six years later by ready to wear lines.

He now was a famous designer. Cardin was a good tailor. At the same time he opened his own shops, which supplied perfumes, cosmetics, interiors, bikes, bed linen, stationery, rubber dinghy and more. To the company belongs an own theatre, that opened „Escape Pierre Cardin“ in 1970 and the „Maxim’s restaurants“ in Paris, Peking, Moscow and in other metropolis. The Cardin imperium, in which the sun never goes down, maintains 840 licences in 94 countries.

In the 1970´s Pierre Cardin was a popular avantgardistic fashion designer. He was inspired by space travel in 1961, the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space.
Pierre Cardin gave fashion a constructive and futuristic look, geometric seams and hemlines reminded of robots.

His fashion was similar to modern sculptures including asymmetries, sometimes it had big necks. In many clothes there are openings in contrasting colours. A special staple he created a „Cardin“, helps him to preserve the complicated necks.
One of his collections reminds of Star Trek design; it was one of several others to go the space age route in 1967.
Cardins new styles were altogether more comfortable and wearable than Rabannes.
Even if his catsuits with helmets and visors did look like something straight out of the twenty-first century. The womens clothes had black shoes and hats. His collection was decorated with big zippers and belts.
The women had a short cut hairstyle, when they took the hat off their heads, it looked futuristic.

Vocabulary

catsuit Overall
hemline Unterkante (Saum)
neck Ausschnitt
seam Saum
space travel Raumfahrt
visor Visier
zipper - Reissverschluss

By Sabrina Kiefernagel and Monika Pap

Sources

Loschek, Ingrid: Die Modedesigner. Ein Lexikon von Armani bis Yamamoto. München: Beck, 1998.
Lehnert, Gertrud: Geschichte der Mode des 20. Jahrhunderts. Köln: Könemann, 2000.
O'Hara Callan, Geogina: Dictionary of Fashion and Fashion Designers. London: Thames and Hudson, 1998.

Timeline Fashion

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