Tomorrow is the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission touching down on the moon, and the Brooklyn Museum will open Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion, a new retrospective of Cardin’s work. Pierre Cardin’s two-tone jersey dresses with vinyl waders, 1969. They were garments that projected utility but were irresistibly sleek and sexily alienish clinically pristine, yet sinuous-all the appeal of an Eero Saarinen Tulip chair, but made for the body.
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Like his “Space Age” design contemporaries of the era, Paco Rabanne and André Courrèges, Cardin perfected using and manipulating fresh-to-market synthetics, plastics, and vinyl, even molding Plexiglass into bandeaus and egg-shaped headgear. That meant developing the streamlined, future-focused vernacular that would come to define his work: sculptural and kinetic geometric, cylindrical, and lenticular silhouettes, fabricated from innovative technology and unusual materials. The couturier, now 97, spent much of the decade forging an aesthetic that focused on youth-fueled modernism, veering away from the previously studied decorum of the atelier.
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He was looking at the possibility of new worlds, and how we would dress for them. The French fashion designer Pierre Cardin, like much of the world in the 1960s, was fixated on far-off horizons-and not just on Earth.