Pierre Cardin Wiki – Biography
Pierre Cardinwas a legendary French fashion designer known for his Space-Age designs, has died.
Pierre Cardin was an Italian-born naturalised-French fashion designer. He is known for his avant-garde style and his Space Age designs. He prefers geometric shapes and motifs, often ignoring the female form. He advanced into unisex fashions, sometimes experimental, and not always practical. He founded his fashion house in 1950 and introduced the “bubble dress” in 1954.
He was designated UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in 1991 and FAO Goodwill Ambassador on 16 October 2009.
Cardin was educated in central France. Beginning his career early, at age 14 he worked as a clothier’s apprentice, learning the basics of fashion design and construction. In 1939, he left home to work for a tailor in Vichy, where he began making suits for women. During World War II, he worked in the Red Cross, launching humanitarian interests that continue to this day.
Pierre Cardin Age
Pierre Cardin has died at the age of 98-years-old.
Family & Siblings
Cardin was born near Treviso. His parents were wealthy landowners, but to escape fascism they left Italy and settled in France in 1924. His father, a wealthy French wine merchant, wished him to study architecture, but from childhood he was interested in dressmaking.
Career
Cardin moved to Paris in 1945. There, he studied architecture and worked with the fashion house of Paquin after World War II. He worked with Elsa Schiaparelli until he became head of Christian Dior’s tailleure atelier in 1947, but was denied work at Balenciaga.
Cardin founded his own house in 1950. His career was launched when he designed about 30 of the costumes for “the party of the century”, a masquerade ball at Palazzo Labia in Venice on 3 September 1951, hosted by the palazzo’s owner, Carlos de Beistegui. He began with haute couture in 1953. He was the first couturier to turn to Japan as a high fashion market when he traveled there in 1959. That same year, he was expelled from the Chambre Syndicale for launching a ready-to-wear collection for the Printemps department store as the first couturier in Paris, but was soon reinstated.
Pierre Cardin used his name as a brand, initially a prestigious fashion brand, then in the 1960s extended successfully into perfumes and cosmetics. From about 1988 the brand was licensed extensively, and appeared on “wildly nonadjacent products such as baseball caps and cigarettes”.
Cardin entered industrial design by developing thirteen basic design “themes” that would be applied to various products, each consistently recognizable and carrying his name and logo. He expanded into new markets that “to most Paris fashion designers … is rank heresy.
Death
Cardin died on 29 December 2020, at the American Hospital of Paris, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, at the age of 98.
Cause of Death
His cause of death is unclear.
