The Great Fashion Designers (20 page)

In 1953, in New York at a party, he finally met Balenciaga, an encounter that was to lead to a long friendship and have a lasting effect on Givenchy's life and work. ‘By then my house had already been established,' he wrote. ‘Nevertheless, that first encounter with M. Balenciaga, a man I had admired since my youth, left me in a state of shock. His influence on my work was immense, and yet I realised I still had everything to learn. I had to acknowledge that, fundamentally, I knew very little about my profession.' He could not go back to apprentice himself, but Balenciaga did take on the role of teacher, allowing Givenchy to preview his own collections. ‘He taught me it isn't necessary to put a button where it doesn't belong, or to add a flower to make a dress beautiful. It is beautiful of itself,' said Givenchy. The two most important principles imparted by Balenciaga and adhered to all of Givenchy's career were, ‘Never cheat' and ‘Never work against the fabric, which has a life of its own'.

Gradually, the acolyte and the mentor became linked in the minds of press and public. In 1956 they both banned the press from their shows until after the buyers had placed their orders unaffected by the opinion of any fashion editor. As a result their clothes would be reviewed, together, a month later. As Givenchy's style matured it fell into step with Balenciaga's, growing ever simpler and more sculptural. Both designers introduced the chemise or sack dress in 1955 and the sheath in 1957. Where Givenchy departed from Balenciaga was in his love of colour—buttercup yellow, electric blue, peppery red, singing purples and pinks. There is often, too, in his work, a sweet, flirtatious playfulness, something of which Balenciaga was never accused. Givenchy introduced the ‘baby doll' look in 1958, collarless jackets, asymmetric dresses and, in 1967, light-hearted shorts ensembles, his riposte to the vulgarity of the micro-mini.

When Balenciaga retired in 1968 he sent most of his clients across the road to Givenchy. In that same year, as the youthquake eclipsed couture, the ready-to-wear line, Givenchy Nouvelle Boutique, was launched, perfectly catching the mood of the times with leopard-print trouser suits and denim pieces top-stitched in orange.

In 1981, while remaining in creative control, Givenchy sold his fashion house to the Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessey group. Showered with many awards at home and abroad, Givenchy was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 1983. In 1991 the Musée Galliera de la Mode et du Costume mounted a huge retrospective exhibition entitled Forty Years of Creation. He retired at the end of 1995 (but remained active as chairman of the World Monuments Fund for France and president of Christie's France) and a series of high-profile young designers has kept the house in the headlines.

Further reading: The Givenchy Style
(1998) by Francoise Mohrt has a charming introduction by Hubert de Givenchy.

Asked in 2006 to define himself in one word, Pierre Cardin replied, ‘as a sculptor.' Although coming from a fashion designer that might sound hubristic, there is justice in his claim. His style, which we call futuristic because so much of it seems inspired by 1950s modernism, by the romance of the space race and by images from sci-fi pulp magazines, was in fact the consequence of applying a bold abstractionism to the human body. Three-dimensional, plastic, his designs have always had a sculptural quality, a clean profile, occasionally a sense of monumentality and a hierarchical presence. He gave the world the bubble dress, the cocoon coat, the trapezoidal cut, enormous circular collars and sharp-edged asymmetric cuts that, along with materials like vinyl, Perspex and mouldable ‘Cardine', proclaimed themselves the high-tech future. Long before he became the first designer to identify China as an emerging market, his design handwriting owed something to Chinese theatre and traditional dress in its love of geometry, illusion and drama.

The adjective most frequently applied to this designer, mega-entrepreneur and French academician, however, is egotistical. The clothes—witty, insouciant, very sexy—deceive you into expecting a sense of humour. The designer who, to celebrate his Chinese coup, gave his men's suits flicked-up ‘pagoda' shoulders would surely be a giggle, but in person any levity is hard to find. In an interview he does not wait for the questions but leads with the assertion that his is the biggest fashion name of all time, circling back to that statement repeatedly to make sure one hasn't missed the point. Brenda Polan, who has interviewed him twice at length, is not the only journalist to be disappointed by his querulous demands for acknowledgement.

‘I am a self-made man,' he told her in 1989. ‘I was the youngest man in fashion in the world, the youngest to have a great, great success. In the beginning people thought I was eccentric. It was hard. From 1950 to 1958 I had to persevere. I needed great confidence. The difference between then and now is that success then came because you were creative, now it is because you are commercial. I was both. I was two personalities—something very unusual in fashion.'

‘Cardin is hugely unreliable,' wrote Richard Morais in 1991. ‘Cardin is a flake. A man who couldn't manage his way across a room let alone run a multinational corporation. And yet Cardin is a phenomenal success.' Allegedly, Cardin still does the company accounts himself in school exercise books and while guesstimates of what the business (composed of twenty-four separate companies, including Maxim's de Paris) is worth are in the billions of euros, no one knows for sure. And although he has talked of selling the business and encourages rumours of impending retirement, he is still working.

In the 1989 interview with Polan, he said, ‘Fashion is my first love and last pleasure. In my theatre, in my restaurant, my hotel, I have a team but in fashion I do everything from A to Z. It is the reason I continue so strongly. I do not want to disappoint. I must get the headlines, project the name for the stores, the customers who buy my clothes. Remember, my first show was in 1950. It's very hard to stay so long on the front page. I am like a railway engine driver; all the wagons follow me.' He has been a great innovator and moderniser in so many ways and on so many levels, a powerful influence on the course of fashion and its global dissemination in the twentieth century.

In October 2008, at a sprightly eighty-six, he presented his dual-season 2009 collection at the Palais Bulles, his huge Cote d'Azur home and many-roomed homage to the curve, the circle, the bubble and the sphere—which is what the collection was all about, too. This was generously ignored by the fashion press; while still demonstrating some of his masterly skill with structure, it was nevertheless a debased and vitiated version of the vision that made him, in Francois Boudot's words, ‘doyen of a new wave of fashion that straddled the world of the past and that of the future' and in Ernestine Carter's, ‘less a couturier than an explosion of talent'.

And that talent is as much about commercial opportunities as it is about design creativity. Cardin was one of the epoch-defining designers of the 1960s. Together with Courrèges and Saint Laurent, he gave young women a wardrobe that was a generational chasm away from their mothers'. But it is as the king of the licensers (one estimate in 2005 was that he held 900 licences worldwide) that he has shaped contemporary fashion, fostering that first marriage of big-name designer and mass-market sales that is now a dominant force.

Pierre Cardin was born in 1922 into a once affluent farming family whose acres north of Venice were devastated by some of the bloodiest battles of the First World War. Pietro-Costante was the youngest of the eleven children of Alessandro and Maria Cardin who escaped economic disaster and Mussolini's blackshirts by moving to France in 1924, where workers for a slowly reviving industry were in short supply. Growing up in Saint-Etienne, a coal-mining town in central France, Cardin, the immigrant, was bullied and, he told his biographer, Richard Morais, dreamed of revenge. In 1930, when Cardin was eight, a school inspector asked his class what they wanted to become. Without hesitation, the young Pierre announced, ‘A couturier.' He was already making clothes for a collection of dolls.

At fourteen he became apprenticed to the best tailor in Saint-Etienne, Chez Bompuis, and began to learn to cut and sew. From a sallow, shy adolescent he blossomed into a beautiful young man, joining a gym and an amateur dramatics company—the start of a lifelong love affair with the theatre. In 1940, as France was overrun by the Nazis and Saint-Etienne became part of the client state of Vichy, Pierre Cardin seized his fate in his hands and decamped for Paris. His parents were alarmed but, recalled Cardin, ‘They knew I was driven by an irresistible call.'

So he tied a cardboard case to his bicycle and set off to pedal the 480 kilometres along the Route Nationale 7, which was choked with refugees. Arrested and robbed by the German occupiers, Cardin diverted to the nearest town, Vichy, a glamorous, expensive spa and now bustling capital of unoccupied France. On the strength of his sewing skills he secured a job at Manby, the best store in town. In 1943, however, he was called up for compulsory labour in German factories. He initially went on the run, living rough, then evaded deportation by creating a wound in his leg that exempted him; he was nevertheless sent to do secretarial work at the French Red Cross in Vichy. At nights he studied accountancy and made clothes for his female co-workers and friends. As the war ended, Cardin finally headed for Paris, equipped with an introduction at the couture house of Paquin.

Jeanne Paquin had founded her couture house in 1891 on her husband's money and was the first couturière to achieve international fame. Her contribution to the death of the corset and rise of more supple clothes was considerable. By the time Cardin joined the house as first tailor she was widowed and retired, and Spaniard Antonio del Castillo was the head designer. Only six months later, Christian Bérard and Marcel Escoffier, working on the costumes for Jean Cocteau's film,
La Belle at la Bete
(Beauty and the Beast), erupted into Paquin's workshop to make up their designs and, in the absence of Jean Marais, the film's star, chose to fit his Beast costumes on Pierre Cardin. ‘I was so overjoyed,' said the stage-struck Cardin, ‘I used to dream about it at night.' His enthusiasm was such that the production team co-opted him for his cutting and stitching skills. His biographer has noted that in later years Cardin has rewritten history to claim he designed the costumes; he did not, but his small part in the making of Cocteau's cult film introduced him to the intellectual demi-monde and inspired an insatiable ambition to succeed in the arts as well as couture.

It also got him an introduction to Schiaparelli, whose place Vendome boutique he joined in 1946 as a
cutter. He lasted two months before joining Escoffier as his assistant at the Comédie-Française, a post which quickly led to a meeting with Christian Dior, who was then engaged in putting together his own couture house. Cardin designed, cut and made a coat and suit for Dior and was offered the job of head of the coat and suit studio. He was one of the original team of forty-seven who created Dior's retrospectively feminine Carolle Line and with it, the New Look.

In 1948 there was evidence that Dior sketches were being leaked to an unprincipled mass manufacturer. The police were called and Cardin was questioned at length in front of colleagues. Eventually, someone from another studio was prosecuted, but Cardin was gravely offended. He resigned to start his own business making theatre costumes in partnership with Marcel Escoffier. Christian Dior, ever generous, would also send to him clients who needed extravagant outfits for costume balls. At about this time, Cardin met the young man, André Oliver, who was to become his life partner and design collaborator.

When Pierre Cardin finally launched his haute couture label in 1953 his work attracted respect but no fashion hysteria. The following year was different, however. He launched his ‘bubble dress,' which was a worldwide success, and opened his two boutiques, Eve and Adam. The Eve boutique was in effect the first germ of designer ready-to-wear. Cardin realised quite quickly that there was more money to be made from manufacturing and distributing simpler, cheaper ‘copies' of his own designs than there ever was from ‘selling' a couture toile for a modest $250 to $500 to a manufacturer. There was, he then realised, even more money to be made from licensing the design and taking a cut on every copy made and sold. The godfather of logo-mania, Cardin was the first designer to license his name unashamedly, and the first to put clothes bearing his name in a department store—both of which are the standard practice today.

After the 1959 launch of a prêt-à-porter boutique in Au Printemps on the boulevard Haussmann, Cardin was expelled from the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, the strict governing body of Parisian couturiers. Unrepentant, he secured the first licence deal for men's shirts and ties, moving on to children's clothing and then in 1968 to his first non-fashion licence for porcelain, thus birthing the age of fashion designer–endorsed lifestyle goods. ‘Recently,' he told Polan in 1989, ‘The Chambre has invited me back as president. I turned them down because I am too busy.'