When an ambitious Pierre Cardin launched a ready-to-wear women’s line for a Paris department store in 1959, it ruffled the skirts of the haute couture. Le scandale! But in lifting high fashion from the bourgeois salon and onto the hoi polloi clothes rack, he jumpstarted the billion-dollar age of the designer label, today’s obsequious signifier of faux cachet. As this documentary gleefully catalogues, in the following decades the enterprising Cardin seared his brand into seemingly everything during a prolonged burst of creativity underwritten by a single-minded business acumen. In addition to imprinting his bread-and-butter womenswear and inaugural menswear, the designer’s name and logo has appeared on sunglasses and prescription eyewear, cologne (remember that phallus-shaped decanter?), cosmetics, furniture, and an AMC muscle car, the Javelin, not to mention private jets and even NASA spacesuits.
For a fleeting moment, House of Cardin questions whether the aggressive international licensing of the brand aesthetically diminished its mystique. But there’s little time here for negativity here in the nonstop flurry of flattery heaped upon the design icon, whose active presence in the film (nearing the century-mark age, he’s still making plans with tomorrow in mind) would probably render any such criticism as disrespectful. Much of the well-deserved praise for him comes from predictable industry admirers such as Jean-Paul Gaultier, Jenny Shimizu, and Naomi Campbell, while less predictable celebrity devotees like Alice Cooper, Dionne Warwick, and Sharon Stone also offer their recollections of the man, the last of whom tearfully recalls when Cardin commented upon her “white rose” beauty at age twenty. Faint praise, or back-handed self compliment?
While the 95-minute length of this cradle-to-not-quite-grave biography quickly covers the Italian-born Cardin’s life with Wikipedic efficiency, the enigmatic question the film purports to tackle — “Who is Pierre Cardin?” – remains largely unanswered. Yes, his daunting myriad artistic accomplishments are on full display, particularly his bold use of geometric and circular shapes in the liberating Mod clothes he designed for the Youthquake generation in the Sixties, but the movie seems more preoccupied with Cardin’s personal wealth and accumulation of property, such as the fabled eatery Maxim’s and the bubbled Palais Bulles, more than anything else. Unlike bad-boy fashion designers Halston and Yves St. Laurent, also the subjects of recently released biomentaries (the eponymous Halston, and Celebration respectively), Cardin comes off as a straight-arrow with a remarkable talent for making money, lacking any provocative personal flaws. There’s little juicy about his life, except for maybe when he briefly left his stalwart, long-time male lover and business associate, André Oliver, for the sultry French actress, Jeanne Moreau. While House of Cardin devotes a few more than a glancing minute to this intriguing episode, perhaps it’s a worthy topic for another documentary at another time.
This article appears in August 28 • 2020.
