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PARIS (REUTERS) – French couturier Pierre Cardin, who made a name for himself selling designer clothes to the masses, and his fortune by being the first to exploit that name as a brand to sell everything from cars to perfumes, died Tuesday. (December 29). ), 98 years old.
In a career spanning more than 60 years, Cardin attracted the scorn and admiration of her fellow fashion designers for her daring business sense. He maintained that he built his business empire without borrowing from a bank.
He was the first designer to sell clothing collections in department stores in the late 1950s and the first to enter the perfume, accessories, and even food licensing business – now a major profit driver for many fashion houses.
“I don’t care if I’m making sleeves for dresses or table legs,” an eloquent quote once read on her website.
As hard as it may be to imagine decades later, Armani chocolates, Bulgari hotels, and Gucci sunglasses are built on Cardin’s understanding that the glamor of a fashion brand had infinite marketing potential.
Over the years, his name has been stamped on tacky razor blades, household items and accessories, even cheap boxer shorts.
He once said that he wouldn’t mind having his initials, PC, engraved on toilet paper rolls, and it was also the inspiration for a phallus-shaped perfume bottle.
His detractors accused him of destroying the value of his brand and the notion of luxury in general. But he did not seem greatly affected by the criticism.
“It made sense to market my name,” Cardin told Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper in 2007. “Does money spoil ideas? After all, I don’t dream about money, but while I dream, I make money. It’s never been about the money. “
Born near Venice on July 2, 1922, to French parents of Italian descent, Cardin was raised in the not-so-glamorous French city of Saint Etienne.
He went to work for a tailor in nearby Vichy at age 17 and dreamed for a time of becoming an actor, working on stage, modeling, and dancing professionally.
Theater masks
When he arrived in Paris in 1945, he made theatrical masks and costumes for Jean Cocteau’s film Beauty and the Beast, and a year later joined the then-unknown Christian Dior.
His first big business venture, when he partnered with the Printemps department store in the late 1950s, led to him being briefly expelled from the rarefied guild of French fashion designers, the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture.
At the time, couturiers from that club were banned from displaying outside of their Paris salons, much less in department stores.
Cardin also blazed a trail out of France long before other fashion multinationals in search of new markets.
He presented a collection in communist China in 1979, when it was still largely closed to the outside world. And just two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1991, a Cardin parade in Moscow’s Red Square drew a crowd of 200,000.
Cardin also expanded into new businesses, buying the legendary Maxim’s restaurant in Paris in the 1980s and opening replica stores around the world. He further leveraged the investment by launching Minim’s, a chain of stylish fast food restaurants that replicated the Belle Epoque décor of the unique original Paris restaurant.
His empire encompasses perfume, food, industrial design, real estate, entertainment, and even fresh flowers.
True to his taste for futuristic designs, Cardin also owns the Palais des Bulles, or Bubble Palace, a residence-venue-events-woven into the cliffs on one of the most exclusive strips of the French Riviera.
Not far away, there is also a castle in the village of Lacoste that once belonged to the Marquis de Sade.
For his latest adventure in February of this year, he teamed up with a designer seven decades his junior.
Pierre Courtial, 27, presented a collection in Cardin’s studio on Paris’s posh Rue Saint-Honore, with pieces that echoed the veteran designer’s geometric aesthetic.
Cardin said she still rated originality above anything else.
“I’ve always tried to be different, to be myself,” Cardin said. “Whether people like it or not, that’s not what matters.”
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