Starring: Documentary, featuring interviews with fashion models, Pierre Cardin, friends of Pierre Cardin, colleagues, and other fashion designers
Distributor: Umbrella Entertainment
Runtime: 97 mins. Reviewed in Jul 2020
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This American-French film, mostly subtitled in English, documents the life of French fashion designer, Pierre Cardin, to illustrate the man behind his famous fashion label. The film documents retrospectively, the life and designs of Cardin and employs rare archival footage to provide an intimate look at Cardin as he approaches the end of an enormously productive professional career.
Born in Italy in 1922 and naturalised in France, Cardin remains one of France’s most iconic designers, who founded his own fashion house in 1950, after working for Christian Dior. He is now 97 years of age, and still demonstrates an extraordinary sense of futuristic, geometric style, that established exciting standards of acceptability in haute-couture fashion when he was young.
Cardin influenced the world’s top models, such as Naomi Campbell, to wear and advertise his clothes. Fashion modelling illustrates a world in which male and female models dress extravagantly (sometimes in a deceptively simple way) to look as attractive as possible, so as to project eye-catching design in the clothes they are wearing to whoever is watching. The creativity of the garments they wear rests essentially in the visual impact of clothes constructed for them in a special way. For Cardin, much of the fashion impact rests in the futuristic relevance of asymmetry: onlookers are led to expect that something might appear in a certain place on clothing, and Cardin frequently makes sure it doesn’t. For Cardin, fabric, colour and design provided pleasurable input to the senses to demonstrate the artistic creativity of the designer. Designing for Cardin “was (always) for tomorrow”.
The documentary establishes in a compelling, and dynamic way the creative genius that Cardin was, and still is. The film justifies Cardin’s place among the top designers of the world. It uses interviews with Cardin himself, conversations with admiring, reverential friends like Sharon Stone, with fellow fashion designers, and with colleagues. The film illustrates stunning garments that provide a rich feast for the eyes – wonderfully illustrated, for instance, by the film’s extraordinary image of a Chinese model dressed in a tubular-white dress, which had a huge red train trailing behind it, that was draped along the stones of the Great Wall of China. In this, and other ways, Cardin revolutionised shapes, fabrics and colours to inventively practise futuristic Art.
The film delves into Cardin’s personal life, but more intensely into his work career. We see glimpses of the impact of World II on his life and his work, and we are asked to contemplate what he might have lost, or gained, by deciding to move from high-couture fashion into ready-to-wear clothing, and then into furniture design, cosmetics, and industrial products. He intentionally expanded his vision globally to give his creativity free reign. His move expelled him from the governing body of French fashion, Chambre Syndicale, but the global outreach and the “New Look” that he established introduced his creativity to a highly receptive international audience.
In the film, Cardin’s talent is amply illustrated by the creations it shows. Modernism heavily shaped Cardin’s artistic sensibilities, and the film teaches viewers to appreciate the importance of a designer who introduced extraordinarily vivid colour and form onto the fashion catwalks of Europe. Jean Paul Gaultier was his assistant, and later, as a fashion designer himself, vividly embellished Cardin’s modernity to striking effect.
This is a glamorously-styled, sophisticated documentary about an ageing artist looking across his achievements to reveal the meaning of the name of Pierre Cardin. It dramatically captures the many contributions that Cardin made to design, particularly in the fashion industry. It is a smartly-produced film about a creative man and his brand, that provides an entertaining tribute, offered in homage mode, to the talents of an outstanding professional.
Peter W. Sheehan is Associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting
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