Tickling Our Fancy

With his name on everything from frying pans to rental tuxes and a global empire that brings in a reported $1 billion in annual revenues, Pierre Cardin may be the world’s richest fashion designer. He has also spent a half-century in French couture, dressing everyone from France’s first lady Bernadette Chirac to Saddam Hussein.

Yet the style cognoscenti have relegated him to the role of McFashion designer--too much mass, not enough class, with his 900 licenses in 140 countries. In the words of Rodney Dangerfield, he don’t get no respect.

Not that it matters. At 79, the designer is beyond caring what people think. “I don’t have to answer to anybody,” he said in broken English during an interview last week in Beverly Hills in which he selectively answered questions.

Like Dangerfield, Cardin is headlining Las Vegas. Tonight, he’ll present a retrospective runway show at the Hard Rock Cafe & Casino, as part of the MAGIC apparel trade show. The haberdashery haven of hip-hoppers and skate rats is hardly the place one would expect to find a rumpled, white-haired couturier. But as usual, Cardin knows what he is doing. He’s reaching out to the young, vintage-obsessed set. And it looks like his innovative 1950s coats and 1960s Space Age styles are poised for a second moment.

The interest started last year, when actress-fashion plate Lisa Marie was photographed wearing a cream Cardin coat with oversized black buttons she picked up at Decades on Melrose Avenue. This month, his clothes were featured at the annual Valentine’s Day luncheon of the Colleagues, a Beverly Hills charity group whose members include Nancy Reagan and Betsy Bloomingdale. And just last week, designer Jeremy Scott sent futuristic, pointy-shouldered suits and sharp, angular dresses down the runway in New York. His references to Cardin’s 1970s collections were unmistakable.

“He left a legacy of amazing design and innovation,” Scott said. “He was constantly evolving, compared to [Andre] Courreges, who did one thing and did it forever. Cardin had a huge vocabulary.”

To a certain degree, he has also been a victim of his own success. “Cardin contributed in a major way to late 20th century design,” said Valerie Steele, chief curator for the museum at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology. “But his licensing has overshadowed the creative contribution.” Cardin himself is fond of saying, “I managed to turn a label into a name.”

His clothes didn’t reflect social trends; they predicted them. In the 1950s, he followed Cristobal Balenciaga in pushing the chemise. He updated slender coats with dramatic cape-shaped, fluted or pleated collars. In the early 1960s, Cardin created galactic gowns with hoop skirts radiating out like satellites, and nylon “cosmonaut” suits for men. By the 1970s, he had softened his silhouette, draping women in tunic and pant ensembles.

But his true genius was anticipating lifestyle marketing years before Ralph, Calvin and Donna came along. Today, Cardin is known in France more as a cultural icon than as a creative force in fashion like newly retired Yves Saint Laurent. He designs furniture, supports the arts by sponsoring productions at his theater in Paris and is a peace ambassador for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

The son of a wine merchant, he was born Pietro Cardin near Venice, Italy. During his childhood, he and his family moved around factory towns in southern France after their hometown was decimated by war. Cardin spent World War II apprenticed to tailors in Vichy and Saint-Etienne before moving to Paris, where he began work as an assistant to Christian Dior in 1946.

It was Cardin who did the actual sewing on the famous 1947 New Look collection, which would put women the world over in cinched-waist jackets and trumpet skirts. Dior was the first fashion designer to set up a licensing agreement, with a U.S. hosiery company, so it’s no surprise that Cardin took the concept to a new level.

He founded his own house in 1949 and spent his early years designing costumes for Europe’s grand postwar parties, including 30 for the famous 1951 ball given by Mexican millionaire Don Carlos de Beistegui at his palazzo in Venice. The experience left Cardin with a rich and loyal clientele of international socialites. He also designed costumes for Jean Cocteau’s 1946 French film, “La Belle et la Bete.”

Despite auspicious creations such as the “bubble dress,” with a balloon-shaped skirt, Cardin’s early collections were often overshadowed by Dior, Balenciaga and newcomer Saint Laurent.

“The press always had a hard time with him,” said Pamela Golbin, curator of Paris’ Musee de la Mode et du Textile and author of “Fashion Designers: Fifty Years of Fashion,” (Watson and Guptill, 2002). His designs for couture ironically never quite fit with what was going on at the time; and “all of his details were really wacky. The sleeves, the colors, the buttons were all completely wacky,” she said.

In the late 1950s, Cardin and others were facing financial ruin from a changed couture market. Few women could afford $10,000 dresses, and designs were routinely being copied, often by in-house designers at American department stores. So Cardin launched a ready-to-wear line in 1959, and later became the first couturier to open a boutique inside a department store, Paris’ Le Printemps.

His creative breakthrough came in 1960, when he introduced his first men’s collection, modeled by Sorbonne students. Corduroy lapel-less jackets as well as a French version of London’s Edwardian look--long coats and cigarette pants--were hailed as the “new look for men,” according to Richard Morais’ “Pierre Cardin: The Man Who Became A Label” (Bantam, 1991).

“He introduced the notion of comfort in men’s attire,” Golbin said.

By the late 1960s, street fashion had taken hold. In Paris, Courreges and Cardin took their inspiration from outer space, using the new synthetic fibers to realize their vision.

“The English had the youth subculture driven by rock ‘n’ roll bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones,” Steele said. “But the French didn’t have that. The Space Age look became a metaphor for youth and the future in France. It was an optimistic message about how you could transform yourself into a modern person by wearing miniskirts, trousers with stretch and other clothes that let you move.”

Cardin produced some of his most fanciful designs during this period, using holograms, plastic and vinyl in explosive colors to their full futuristic effect. A 1968 orange minidress is fitted with plastic bubbles on the breasts that pop out like headlights. A series of black stretch fabric gowns are held up by halters sculpted from hammered metal. “At the time, it was almost vulgar,” Cardin said.

He also tinkered with cutouts--panels on coats and dresses that lift to expose bare skin. “Air-conditioning,” he joked.

By the 1970s, Cardin was licensing himself across the globe. In 1979, he became the first Western designer to present a fashion show in China, just blocks away from Mao Tse-tung’s mausoleum.

“It was a symbolic moment,” Steele said. “Nowadays, the fashion industry depends so much on Asia not only to produce clothes but also as a major consumer market. It was far-sighted of Cardin to see that back then.”

He continued to present couture collections through the 1980s and ‘90s. But like Halston, the more he spread his name, the less he was taken seriously.

Cardin, who lives in a circular Palais Bulles (bubble palace) near Cannes and 31 other houses across the globe, defends his choices vigorously: “Why should I work only for the rich people? I want to work for the people on the street,” he said. Far from being rattled by being relegated to the dark hole of mass merchandising, he is proud of his career. “It is what I wanted,” he said. “I want to die the richest man in the world.”