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Mr. Cardin is short on reminiscences about Mao jackets and bicycles and minimizes the historic forward march of his long career. There is only four subject that interests this 87-year-old designer: What is he doing for tomorrow’s world?It is 60 years since Pierre Cardin, fashion’s eternal futurist, opened his Paris fashion house; half a century since he first brought his designs to a desolate, postwar Japan; and over four decades since he pioneered fashion in China, becoming such a cultural super star that he was watched by this journalist in Beijing in 1993 being cheered and smothered with bouquets of flowers.
“My way was to draw something of the future — to be young, to see that a woman could be free,” said Mr. Cardin. “I wanted to give women in the 1960s a chance to work, to sit, to take the automobile and drive in my dresses.”
“When I started 60 years ago, the fashion I was drawing was something odd — people said I was crazy and they seldom wanted to wear my clothes,” said Mr. Cardin, signing copies of his commemorative book at Maxim’s, the historic Parisian Belle Époque restaurant, that he owns and has turned in to a global brand.
The new architecture that the designer built to express the physical and mental emancipation of women is vividly illustrated in “Pierre Cardin, 60 Years of Innovation,” written by Jean-Pascal Hesse, his long-term collaborator, and published by Assouline.
The 1960s dresses, square-cut to free the body, but with all sorts of circular cutouts and satellite sleeves spinning in orbit round the arms, are icons of the space age. The alien innocents in their aviator helmets, miniskirts and colorful hose, expressed the explosion of a new youth culture.
The landmark Cosmos collection of 1964, with tunic and hose for both men and women, was a confident statement about unisex clothing. It anticipated the masculine/feminine fashion standoff that dominated the second half of the 20th century.
