Back to the future: Cardin's celestial revolution

When you talk about Pierre Cardin (and you are over forty or have a solid visual culture), you are not simply talking about fashion. The images that the name evokes immediately refer to the pop culture we grew up with. Cardin dressed the Beatles (the iconic collarless jacket, 1963), inspired Kubrick, making the Space Race fashionable. And, by covering them, he helped discover and define the talent of divas from at least three decades, from Liz Taylor to Anna Magnani, from Brigitte Bardot to Madonna, who appeared in public in 2023 wearing the designer's famous retro-futurist glasses. For others, Pierre Cardin remains 'the underwear man at the market': also, it should be remembered, a great invention. In fact, Cardin was among the first to engineer the licensed franchise model (over 800 in 140 countries), after having literally invented ready-to-wear. Because Cardin, besides being a great tailor - the first of the Maison Dior - was above all a visionary entrepreneur. And, before that, a designer in the full sense of the term: a designer of worlds, of forms, of imagery. He never designed just clothes, but symbolic systems: wearable architectures, hypotheses of the future, devices of meaning, as if fashion were a side branch of urban planning or science fiction.

The Venetian and culturally catholic Cardin expressed a rigour that did not look to the past, but sought an entirely new path: an avant-garde out of time, at the height of the economic boom of the 1950s, when the future still seemed a collective promise and not a problem to be managed. Today, the present and future of the Maison - which retains assets in real estate, art and catering - are in the hands of his great-grandson Rodrigo Basilicati Cardin. Not an easy responsibility: relaunching a historicised brand, paradoxically in part weakened by the very licensing model that had decreed its global success, and now distant from the new tensions between ready-to-wear, sustainability and exclusivity.

(Photo credit : Pierre Cardin evolution)

The relaunch passes through two moves that, in the often paludated world of fashion, sound like possible revolutions. The first is the Pierre Cardin Young Designers Award, an international competition for young designers, creatives and stylists, which takes talent out of the salons and self-referential ateliers. Among the thirteen finalists - all winners - are five Italians, trained at the Fashion, Fine Arts and Marangoni Academies: an encouraging sign, which tells of an education that has returned to cultivating design and risk, rather than just communication. At the end of 2025, at the Christmas Theatre in Athens, a converted former Olympic venue, the prize-giving ceremony was accompanied by Dance of Galaxies, a multidisciplinary performance realised with the advice of astrophysicist David Elbaz. A sort of contemporary wunderkammer between art and science, in memory of Pierre Cardin, written and directed by Patrick Dedole, with choreography by Massimiliano Volpini and Philippe Kratz. Centre stage will be Roberto Bolle, Tatiana Melnik and Danielle Allouma, accompanied by the Nuovo Balletto della Toscana.

The scientific and technical vocation is not a fad. Rodrigo Basilicati Cardin is an engineer with a background in space research. A fact that is far from marginal, if we consider that, at the end of the performance, four collections were presented, also made with aerospace materials recovered from 'leftovers' of space missions and satellite launches. Space thus returns to the centre of Cardini's aesthetics not as décor, but as method: designing clothes as one would design an extreme environment.

The second move is perhaps the most radical. Presented in Paris, in the Maison's historic headquarters, with an atypical défilé, the new collection introduces an almost engineering principle of the suit. Fifty-nine models - like the number-address that has become the Maison's symbolic figure - constructed from a "second skin" in a European technical material capable of regulating heat exchange in every season. On this base is applied the actual dress, fixed by means of magnets.