Brooklyn Museum goes back to the future with Pierre Cardin retrospective

By

Robin Driver

Published
Apr 11, 2019

This summer, the Brooklyn Museum will host “Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion”, a retrospective of the visionary designer’s seven-decade career, the first of its kind to come to New York in 40 years.

 
Curated by the museum’s Senior Curator of Fashion and Material Culture Matthew Yokobosky, the exhibition will feature more than 170 objects, from haute couture and ready-to-wear apparel and accessories, to photographs, films and more, most of which have been selected from the Pierre Cardin archive.
 
The retrospective will be organized chronologically, starting in the 1950s, before passing through the major highlights of Cardin’s career, such as the iconic “target dress” from his 1964 “Cosmocorps” collection, and his experiments with unisex fashion and original menswear, including his collarless suit jacket and "cylinder" pants.

Costumes designed by Cardin for film and theater will be featured as well, including pieces worn by Mia Farrow in 1968’s A Dandy in Aspic and Jeanne Moreau in La baie des anges (1963).

Visitors will also be able to view videos of the French designer’s runway shows in locations such as the Espace Pierre Cardin, the Great Wall of China (1979) and Moscow's Red Square (1991).
 
Furthermore, in an effort to explore Cardin’s contribution to other forms of art and design, as well as wider culture in general, the retrospective will also display some of his rarely seen furniture and home décor pieces.
 
Born in 1922, Cardin is perhaps best known for his futuristic avant-garde designs, which combine an architectural approach to construction with innovative use of materials such as vinyl and metallic textiles, as well as the designer’s own “Cardine” fabric, released in 1968.
 
Having founded his own fashion house in 1950, Cardin was the first couturier to release a ready-to-wear line in 1958, and was among the first designers to license his name, applying it to a wide range of products that were distributed around the globe.
 
His designs have been worn by everyone from French actress Brigitte Bardot to former US first lady Jacqueline Kennedy and American actress and singer Raquel Welch.
 
“Throughout his decades-long career, Pierre Cardin has proved to be a master tailor and designer, as well as an intuitive businessman," said Yokobosky in a release. "He truly is a twentieth-century renaissance man whose work has advanced fashion and design while continuously giving society a new and breathtaking vision of what the future might look like."
 
“Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion” will open at the Brooklyn Museum on July 20, 2019, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, and will run until January 5, 2020.