Pietro Costante Cardin (2 July 1922 – 29 December 2020), known as Pierre Cardin, was an Italian-French fashion designer. He is known for what were his avant-garde style and Space Age designs. He preferred 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.
Though he is remembered today mostly for his Space Age late '60s womenswear, during the 1960s and first half of the '70s he was better known as the top menswear designer of the time, the man who had reintroduced shaped, fitted suits to the public after a long period of looser fit in men's clothes. Cardin was often said to have been the main non-British leader of the Peacock Revolution that had begun in the UK. Retailers noted that Cardin's popularity had taught men to associate a designer's name with their clothing the way women had long done. His menswear collection from the year 1960 was so influential that the Beatles' tailor Dougie Millings copied its collarless suits for the group in 1963.
Cardin was designated a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in 1991, and a United Nations FAO Goodwill Ambassador in 2009.
Cardin was born on 2 July 1922 near Treviso in northern Italy, the son of Maria Montagner and Alessandro Cardin. His parents were wealthy wine merchants, but lost their fortune in World War I. To escape the blackshirts they left Italy and settled in Saint-Étienne, France in 1924 along with his ten siblings. His father wanted him to study architecture, but from childhood he was interested in dressmaking and at age fourteen apprenticed with Saint-Étienne tailor Louis Bompuis.
Cardin moved to Paris in 1945 after World War II. There, he studied architecture, briefly pursued an acting career, and met Jean Cocteau, who employed him to do costumes for his 1946 film Beauty and the Beast/La Belle et la Bête. He worked with the fashion house of Paquin, then Elsa Schiaparelli, until Jean Cocteau and Christian Berard introduced him to Christian Dior and Dior made him head of his tailleure atelier in 1947, but he was denied work at Balenciaga. While at Dior, he contributed the popular Bar suit to Dior's inaugural 1947 "Corolle" collection, already displaying the deft tailoring and pleating that he would be known for in later years. Some pieces produced at the house from 1947 to 1949 contained features that would be hallmarks of Cardin's independent work years later, notably skirts consisting of separate flying panels or blades, prophetic of skirts Cardin would produce in the late sixties and early seventies, though in very different shapes and lengths.
Cardin founded his own fashion house in 1950. His early designs fit well into the fashion world of the time, especially his suits, which quickly attracted notice in Paris. His career was launched when he designed about 30 of the costumes for a masquerade ball in Venice, hosted by Carlos de Beistegui in 1951. The same year, Andre Oliver joined Cardin as an assistant, eventually becoming associate designer and artistic director. Cardin inaugurated his haute couture output in 1953 with his first collection of women's clothing and became a member of the Chambre Syndicale, a French association of haute couture designers. The following year he opened his first boutique, Eve, and introduced the "bubble dress", which is a short-skirted, bubble-shaped dress made by bias-cutting over a stiffened base.
For spring of 1957, he presented a more extensive couture collection than he had before and it brought him widespread international attention for the first time. The collection focused on two dress silhouettes, a long, lean, unwaisted chemise dress and one that featured what he called a "Navette" line, a high waist with fullness over the hips tapering down to a drawn-in knee. A navette is a weaving shuttle, so the skirts were vaguely spindle-shaped. Observers compared the skirt shape to an egg standing on its narrow end or to an amphora. Skirts of similar form were a rising trend among designers in France, Italy, and Spain. The Navette line also extended to coats. His tailoring ability was expressed in three different suit styles, all high-waisted. In February of that year, just after the collection debuted, Christian Dior suggested publicly that Cardin could easily become French couture's leading light, and after Dior's death that October, the fashion press considered Cardin to be one of three young designers who might rise to a position equivalent to Dior's.
Also in 1957, he opened his Adam boutique for men. By that time, alone among Paris couturiers, he had already established a name for himself in menswear, particularly for a line of small, squared-off bowties in unusual fabrics. His entry into the field paralleled the beginnings of a renaissance in creative menswear occurring in the UK, which would inspire Cardin during the following decade.
Cardin was the first couturier to turn to Japan as a high fashion market when he travelled there in 1957, and it was in Japan that he would discover one of his favorite models and muses, Hiroko Matsumoto, known professionally as Hiroko, whom the public would associate with Cardin through much of the 1960s.
After his breakthrough 1957 couture collections, Cardin's womenswear shows would be regularly covered in the world's fashion press. He continued to be recognized as a top tailor, and his late 1950s collections were noted for their accomplished presentations of a number of trends of the time: waistless dresses, geometric seaming, large collars, large buttons, shoulder interest, knee-length skirts, large tall hats, and bouffant hairstyles. These styles were accepted in Europe but considered avant-garde in the US, where Americans preferred the kind of figure-revealing forms established by Dior in 1947 and rejected the new shapes out of Europe.
Cardin also began to display at this time design elements that would become characteristic of his work for years to come. His love of pleats, cowl necklines, side closures, and batwing sleeves, for instance, already evident in the late fifties, would still be notable in his output in the 1980s. Large, upturned bowl hats set on the back of the head were also favored by him in these years and would continue to be seen in his collections into the mid-1960s.
In 1958, he showed knee-length puffball skirts, coats with similar turned-under hems, and tops that featured integral scarf constructions, a theme that Cardin would continue for much of his career. For the fall, he showed large, innovative collar treatments, high waists, bouffant millinery, and slim, somewhat Directoire eveningwear, all contributing to what he called a mushroom silhouette. His 1959 work focused on a lowered and extended shoulderline achieved via tucked sleeves; continued collar interest; dresses that were either chemises or softly bloused about a belted waist; puff-hemmed balloon skirts for evening somewhat similar to Balenciaga's of 1950; and continued large hats and bouffant hairdos.
He also presented his first women's ready-to-wear collection in 1959.
In early 1960, Cardin showed a full menswear line for the first time. This 1960 menswear collection attracted international attention with its narrow "Cylinder" silhouette (called by some a "cigarette" shape), natural shoulders, center-vented suit jackets, foulard shirts, prominent belts, and, above all, high-buttoning, collarless suits, famously copied by the Beatles' tailor three years later.
Cardin's women's collections in the early 1960s often concentrated on more flowing lines than previously, lines that were sometimes said to be influenced by the 1930s. To his favorite pleats, batwing sleeves, cowl necklines, scarf tops, side closures, and bowl hats he added scalloping, open backs, deep decolletage, capelet collars, tailored shawls, floating panels, bias cuts, and extensive chiffon. His autumn 1960 collection was particularly well received, with a focus on slim coats, soft dresses, and extensive scalloping, paired with dramatic handbags and close-fitting, helmet-like cloche hats that looked like they were straight out of the late 1920s or early 1930s. His hems stayed mostly at the knee for daywear but were lengthened by several inches for fall of 1962, giving an even more thirties-like appearance. This fluid thirties-ish look would extend into 1965 with handkerchief hems and scalloped skirts.