Pierre Cardin1 : The Great Name Of French Haute Couture2

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As the one-man show of fashion, he has, over the last forty-three years, accumulated every role: as a visionary designer and tireless businessman3 , he is so famous that, in China, he is sometimes mistaken for the French President. Throughout his career, he has always preceded his peers in conquering the world; in 1957, he took the inaugural flight on the Paris to Tokyo route; he was also the first couturier to launch a line of ready-to-wear. 4
There is little he has not invented in his tireless quest for the future; the "cosmocorps"(1963) , colored tights, roulette trousers. . . "Working for him, I learnt that you could make a hat out of a chair," says one of his former assistants, a certain Jean-Paul Gaultier. As the first designer to diversify, he bought the former Theatre des Ambassadeurs, near the Champs-Elys6es, and, in 1970, transformed it into a show venue, the Espace Cardin. In 1 978 , he signed production agreements with the Soviet Union. In 1983, he opened the West's first restaurant in China, Maxim's.5
At the head of a veritable empire, Pierre Cardin loves contrasts, electing, since 1994, to present his ...
... haute couture collections only to a privileged circle of clients. He is not afraid of contradictions. Received abroad as no lesser figure than a head of state, he sleeps in a monk's cell , with a view on the Elysee Palace6. He is a futurist who hates computers. The former cutter from the House of Dior is one of the magnates of "business fashion". He has never borrowed a single franc from a bank. He auto-finances everything, does not advertise (except for his perfumes) and re-invests his profits in property. "Money is only a means," he says, "my lifestyle has not changed in twenty years. "
His empire extends to more than one hundred countries and indirectly provides employment to 180,000 people in 700 factories. His name is already on some 800' products, including floor tiles, jams, pots and pans, ties. Like Chanel, Pierre Cardin undoubtedly knows that "only fools dare link money earned with success". Driven by ambition, he accumulates titles as he does his Boule furniture, parrots and dresses, which he keeps in a "personal museum".
"I wanted a space of my own, something very big and free where one could do whatever one wanted, where things would always be different. I wanted to stage avant-garde productions that had nothing to do with the bourgeois7 vau¬deville8 theater or classical comedies. - Pierre Cardin on Espace Cardin ( a theater building that also houses an art gallery, a buffet-style restaurant, and a private cinema).
I wash with my own soap - wear my own perfume ... go to bed with my own sheets . . . have my own food products ... I live on me. - on endorsements.
The dress is a vase which the body follows. My clothes are like modules in which bodies move. It's a completely new concept in fashion. Others follow the breasts, the thigh, the hip. Not me. I'm not interested in the body!
The jean! The jean is the destructor ... a dictator! It is destroying creativity. 9 "
Jamie Huckbody, Pierre Cardin's personal assistant, a highly strung woman, 295 as small and as tremulous as a sparrow that has accidentally flown into the house, is frantic : Monsieur Cardin is nowhere to be seen. As she said, Cardin avoids eye contact, vigorously shuffling a handful of unruly papers that refuse to make a nice neat pile in his gigantic fingers, as plump as heat-swollen Lincolnshire sausages. I can hardly take my eyes off them. It's a bizarre, perhaps sad, picture of a man who many perceive to be desperately clinging onto the past and refusing to give in to the future. Strange, considering that this is a man whose past has been all about the future. The godfather of the fashion industry, with its obsession for logo-embossed products and licensing deals, Cardin was the first to license his name unashamedly, and the first to put his clothes in a department store - both of which are the standard practice in fashion today.