Space Age fashion, unisex looks, illuminated apparel and global licensing are some of the areas that Cardin has helped to pioneer.
The Brooklyn Museum’s Pierre Cardin retrospective explores the peaks and pinnacles of his 70-year career, but what the multimedia exhibition underscores time and again is the designer’s forward thinking.
With his 97th birthday behind him, Cardin will not be at Wednesday night’s opening party for “Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion,” as hoped. But the designer has been intrinsically involved with the planning of the exhibition, which features 19 sections — each with a well-measured mix of fashion, snapshots, videos, accessories, furniture and industrial design — set against Pop Art-ish and photographic backdrops. The show runs through Jan. 5 with leadership support provided by Chargeurs Philanthropies.
By today’s standards, “Twenty-First Century Unisex,” “Kinetic,” “Licensing,” “Democratization and Pluralization,” “New Material and The Visible Invisible,” and “A Future for Cinema” may seem like been-there-done-that. But what distinguishes Cardin from many of his contemporaries is how he raced to be the first, as indicated by the Eve Arnold-shot photo of the fashion show that Cardin staged at the Great Wall of China in 1979 — but was only recently revealed. In addition to China, Cardin was the first European designer to show in Russia and India. That sounds about right for a designer who once said, “I do not look backward but forward.”
Like many museums around the globe that are using fashion as the gateway to get patrons in the door, The Brooklyn Museum has upped its numbers thanks to shows dedicated to David Bowie, Frida Kahlo and others. A video clip from its 2014 Jean Paul Gaultier exhibition helped to set the Cardin one in motion. After learning that Gaultier worked for Cardin at one point, the curators started to look at Gaultier’s work through different eyes. That jogged such childhood memories of getting a Pierre Cardin gift set — perfume, soap-on-a-rope and that kind of thing — as well as images of broad-shouldered jackets from the Eighties. The Newport Restoration Foundation’s compact Cardin exhibition in 2017 was followed by one at the SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film, which prompted Matthew Yokobosky, senior curator of fashion and material culture, to float the idea by the Brooklyn Museum’s Anne Pasternak and David Berliner. “PIERRE CARDIN YES!!!” was their e-mailed response, he said.
The curator’s favorites include the early Seventies Kinetic dresses (like the “Carwash”) that “move in ways we really haven’t seen before in fashion,” and the illuminated clothes, a concept first tested in 1968 by embroidering lights into a dress debuted by Cardin muse Maryse Gaspard. In the last gallery before the gift shop, a handful of light-infused dresses are shown opposite a monitor playing a 1963 episode of “The Jetsons” that references a “Pierre Martian” original.
Saturday’s 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing appears to be symbiotic, given all the Space Age-inspired fashion and memorabilia. Cardin was so enthralled that he visited NASA in 1969, and “you can see he absorbed the reality of that technology and the same thing happened later when he visited computer labs. The designer’s computer 1980 coat has fins on the back similar to ones he saw on a computer,” said Yokobosky, gesturing toward a colorful futuristic lamp as another iteration of the design.
