Paris (AFP)

"I invented everything", liked to say Pierre Cardin, who died Tuesday at the age of 98: this futurist-style couturier, pioneer of ready-to-wear, was also a businessman with a world-famous name, who had bet on all-round diversification.

His office, next to the Elysée Palace, where mixed up photos showing him alongside Fidel Castro or Louis Aragon, old newspaper articles and various trinkets, testified to the exceptional career of this historical figure. of French fashion.

This son of Italian immigrants, who never retired, brought haute couture to the streets by launching a ready-to-wear line in 1959.

A pioneer, he turned very early on to Asia, where he enjoyed great notoriety: he went to Japan in 1957, then undergoing reconstruction, and organized parades in China in 1979.

The couturier, whose collarless costumes inspired those of the Beatles, was also a man of culture and patron, invested in theater, dance and music, with the Espace Cardin, in Paris, and the lyric art festival. and Lacoste theater, in the Lubéron.

Jack-of-all-trades, he had embarked on the creation of furniture as well as the hotel and catering industry with Maxim's.

- Bubble and cosmocorps dresses -

Honorary Ambassador of Unesco, he was also the first academic couturier.

It is also in the large meeting room of the Academy of Fine Arts that he presented at the end of November 2016, at the age of 94, one of the river parades he was accustomed to, to mark his 70 years. careers.

Tireless, he explained in July 2016 shortly before the presentation of a new collection, always "need (s) to 'express".

Born July 2, 1922 near Venice, Pierre Cardin left Italy for France at the age of two with his parents fleeing fascism.

After making his debut in a tailor in Saint-Etienne and working as an accountant for the Red Cross in Vichy during the war, he landed in Paris in 1945.

After working for Paquin and Schiaparelli, he joined Christian Dior, with whom he participated in the "New Look" revolution, before launching his own fashion house.

A designer with a futuristic aesthetic, like André Courrèges and Paco Rabanne, Pierre Cardin enjoyed success from his beginnings with his bubble dresses.

He plays with innovative materials, colors and geometric shapes, designs target dresses inspired by "op art", molded dresses, elliptical pants, colorful and trapezoidal coats, Mao collar man suits. ...

Fascinated by the conquest of space, he was inspired by it to create unisex "cosmocorps" suits in jersey.

- A major contribution -

The system of licenses, contracts entrusting the manufacture of products to a third company in exchange for royalties for the use of the name, made its fortune (it held approximately 350, against 900 at the height of its success, in a hundred of country).

This extreme diversification has had the effect of popularizing its name but also of devaluing the brand and has attracted the contempt of some of its peers.

So much so that today, apart from Jean-Paul Gaultier, who worked at Cardin at the beginning of his career, no figure of fashion mentions his contribution to fashion, however major: he had for example received three "Dice d 'or', French fashion distinctions awarded until the early 1990s.

Pierre Cardin was until the end a hard worker who controlled his business 100%, the only one of his generation to have remained independent.

In 2011, he announced that he wanted to sell this empire for a billion euros, but had not found a buyer.

In 2019, the Brooklyn Museum in New York devoted its first major retrospective in thirty years to him, a way for the museum to contribute to the revaluation of the image of the creator.

The businessman was no stranger to controversy.

Its multiple restoration works in Lacoste have for several years aroused a rebellion among the inhabitants.

Ditto in 2012 for his pharaonic project of Palais Lumière in Venice, which never saw the light of day.

The couturier did not have any children.

"I was attractive, pretty damn good looking and rather handsome (...) I had a lot of success with men, with women," said Pierre Cardin, who had his assistant André Oliver as a companion and experienced a four-year love affair with actress Jeanne Moreau.

© 2020 AFP