Space age clothing6/11/2023 Venturing out alone, Cardin started out as a costume designer for stage and theatre, investing in his designs a playful, outlandish quality which would remain for the rest of his career. Pierre Cardin at the St.James Theatre / Photograph by Ivan Farkas / 1977 ![]() “Designers like Pierre Cardin are the future of haute couture,” praised Dior, after Cardin helped him launch his pioneering ‘New Look’ of the 1950s. A hard worker, Cardin quickly moved on to work with prestigious designers including Elsa Schiaparelli and Christian Dior, learning enough tricks, skills and connections to quickly progress. In 1945, following the end of the war, Cardin moved to Paris and took on an apprenticeship with the famous couturier Jeanne Paquin, where he helped create costumes of French Surrealist artist Jean Cocteau’s iconic film Beauty and the Beast. Working as a couturier’s apprentice aged 14, Cardin moved on to work for a tailor in Vichy, specialising in women’s suits. His family quickly fled to Saint-Etienne in France to escape the rise of fascism when he was just 2 years old, changing his name from Pietro to the French version, Pierre. Though less of a household name, perhaps, than his recent contemporaries, including Coco Chanel and Christian Dior, Cardin’s legacy is just as important, as revealed in a huge retrospective at New York’s Brooklyn Museum from 2019-20, revealing the lasting influence he has had, not only on mainstream 1960s fashion, but the templates we continue to know and love today.Īlthough he is known today as a Parisian, Cardin was born Pietro Cardin in San Biagio di Callalta in Venice, Italy, in 1922, the youngest of 10 siblings. His sci-fi take on fashion came to define the rebellious, avant-garde attitude of a new, 1960s youth culture, who rejected the old-world glamour of the 1950s in favour of a new, industrialised future. Like many of his generation, Cardin embraced the arrival of the Space Age in the late 1950s with great gusto, envisioning a future world made of day-glo, candy coloured plastic, vinyl and neon. Shiny, thigh-skimming boots, skin-tight synthetics, stretchy knits and micro-miniskirts these were the epoch defining looks of Pierre Cardin. “The clothes that I prefer are those I invent for a life that doesn’t exist yet – the world of tomorrow.”
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