Last week one of the great creators of 1960s fashion spirit – Pierre Cardin – opened the doors of his Past-Present-Future museum in the posh Marais neighborhood of Paris, showing the last 50 years of his avant-garde career, known for an out-of-the-ordinary futuristic touch, geometric shapes and outer-space millinery.
Pierre Cardin moved to Paris in 1945, where he started working at the Paquin fashion house founded by famous designer Jeanne Paquin. He would move to the fashion house of Elsa Schiaparelli within months. The subsequent year Cardin began to work for Christian Dior’s newly opened maison. As soon as 1950 Pierre Cardin established his own house and in 1953 he presented his first womenswear collection. The following year he introduced the “bubble dress”, which sparked an instant success. Looking for inspiration outside of Paris’ narrow fashion scene, Cardin started to draw from Eastern influences, becoming the first couturier to launch his products on the Japanese high fashion market in 1959. Since then, Pierre Cardin fashion house has become an empire, producing products as disparate as house furniture and bottle water.
The exhibition of the Past-Present-Future museum collects around 200 pieces tracing Cardin’s career through haute-couture designs, accessories and jewelry. The visual representation is stripped-down, yet at the same time overwhelming: decorated with nothing more than a date-label the contextual placement within fashion history or the designer’s own creative past is meant to be constructed by the viewer. A couple images of the designer himself adorn the walls, but Cardin hopes his designs will speak for themselves. The outfits include coats with square pleats, skirts threaded with hoops and even a black lace dress perfectly fitting for the red carpet of today. Looking at this vast collection on cannot but wonder how does Pierre Cardin’s prophetic mind really work.
