Pierre Cardin, dies aged 98 Pierre Cardin

Pierre Cardin, the Parisian designer who forever changed fashion when he broke with French couture houses and offered ready-to-wear clothing in department stores, ultimately transforming his name into a diversified global brand, died on Tuesday. He was 98.

He lived in Paris and acquired properties including a castle in the south of France once owned by the Marquis de Sade and the Palais Bulles, or “Bubble Palace” his futuristic mansion in Cannes.

Mr Cardin made his mark artistically in the 1960s as a leading designer of the “Space Age” look, with unisex clothing, bold geometric patterns and the use of vinyl and plastic.

Fashion was just the start of Mr Cardin’s business empire. He went on to sell eyeglasses, umbrellas, perfume, luggage, linens, furniture, mattresses, skis and coffee pots.

“If someone asked me to do toilet paper, I’d do it,” Cardin told the New York Times in 2002. “Why not?”

In 1959, at the Paris department store Printemps, Cardin became the first designer to introduce a ready-to-wear – or “pret-a-porter” – women’s line for a broad audience. With that act of independence, Cardin steered himself away from the haute couture houses that dominated the Paris fashion scene.

“It was Cardin who first equated fashion design with the masses, and he made the notion of luxury for everyone into an international currency,” fashion writer Elisabeth Langle wrote in a 2005 book, “Pierre Cardin: Fifty Years of Fashion and Design”.

“They said pret-a-porter will kill your name,” Cardin said in an interview, “and it saved me.”

He was also a pioneer in men’s fashion. He opened Adam, a boutique featuring printed shirts and ties, in 1957, and three years later presented the first haute couture show for men.

His high-buttoned, collarless jackets captured the fancy of four lads from Liverpool, England, and as the Beatles conquered the music world, the Cardin look soared with them.

Cardin leveraged his fame through branding, licensing and franchising. For many years, he said his trademark had 800 licenses in 140 countries. By mid-2017, the number of active Cardin licenses had dropped to about 350.

At times he was cited as an example of licensing run amuck. Time magazine, in a 1975 story, called him a “shrewd fantasist who has tacked his name on to just about anything that can be nailed, glued, baked, molded, bolted, braced, bottled, opened, shut, pushed or pulled.”

In 1981 Cardin purchased the landmark restaurant Maxim’s de Paris. True to form, he globalised the Maxim’s brand by franchising branches in Brussels, Beijing, Rio de Janeiro, London and New York, opening Maxim’s hotels and launching a line of Maxim’s luxury products. The results were mixed.

The Brussels and Rio restaurants closed within a few years, and the New York restaurant shuttered in 2000. Cardin took his clothing to every corner of the globe.

He targeted the Japanese market after visiting there in 1957, signed production agreements with the Soviet Union in 1978 and, in 1979, became one of the first western companies to do business in China.

Cardin long ago announced that he intended to sell his empire, which he estimated to be worth at least €1 billion.

It wasn’t at all clear that anybody but Cardin could run his runaway brand. Richard Morais, in his 1988 biography “Pierre Cardin: The Man Who Became a Label,” said Cardin was better at spinning — and sometimes embellishing — his image than at running a company.

“The Cardin empire was a giant fungus with its own independent life,” Morais wrote. Bloomberg.

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