Pierre Cardin's house stages a spectacle of Venice articulated around sci-fi materials and a starry future

VENICE, Italy - The house of Pierre Cardin paid another tribute to the space-age couturier on July 2, the day he would have turned 100 and in the city that was his favorite Italian retreat before his death in December 2020 at age 98.

"My uncle didn't really like receiving birthday wishes but he was thinking of celebrating his 100th birthday with a special event in Paris," said his great-nephew Rodrigo Basilicati-Cardin, who took over as CEO of the company. in 2018 and became its president and artistic director in 2020.

Staged in front of 300 guests inside the stucco Palazzo Ca' Bragadin, a lavish estate in the heart of the city owned by the designer for many years, the show featured 'Cent', a festive collection of designs original and new eco-responsible pieces imagined by the brand's team of five designers, led by Basilicati-Cardin, an engineer by training.

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The venue for the show suited Basilicati-Cardin, reminiscent of how his uncle's career took off after designing a dozen costumes for Salvador Dalì and his close circle of friends for Venice's lavish Bal Beistegui in 1951. he designer's attachment to Italy is also best exemplified by the pieces he staged at Espace Cardin, the Parisian event venue that closed its doors for good in 2016 after nearly five decades but that the house aims to reopen at some point. Over the years, the venue has invited Italian artists, including dancers Paolo Bortoluzzi and Carla Fracci and soprano Renata Tebaldi, to perform.

Theatre and director with over 600 plays to his credit and costume designers for Jean Cocteau's 1946 classic "Beauty and the Beast", among others, Cardin would have been proud of the direction Saturday night in which talented pianist Natalia Morozova and violinist Anastasiya Petryshak entertained guests with tunes by Ennio Morricone and Astor Pizzolla as models paraded down the elevated catwalk.

The show opened with a few dozen pieces spanning seven decades, from Cardin's flagship collection in 1951 to the styles he sketched just months before his death. They included a red dress coat which Basilicati-Cardin says prompted the house's founder to enter the licensing business at the request of a Texas distributor to produce approximately 200,000 pieces of the item; skirt suits with draped backs, pleated vinyl skirt jumpsuits and bras with Plexiglas bubble inserts.

The new collection is built around key house codes: hoop skirts, color blocking, cutouts, scalloped hems and space-age inflections, with models twirling and striking old-school poses. Only a few styles, including short scalloped dresses and sand-toned puffy dresses, came across as modern as most of the range had a rather retro-futuristic bent. It paid homage to the founder's democratic design vision, rooted in accessibility and practicality rather than elitism.

“He thought sharing was important, there was never any question of fashion requiring more than 700 hours of manual work,” Basilicati-Cardin noted.

Pieces featured next-generation fabrics, such as recycled polyester; blends of silk and lotus fibers, the latter from Cambodian supplier Samatoa; banana leaf fibers and organic cotton – and sci-fi textiles. A few numbers were made from a lightweight textile made from Kevlar filaments and typically used to protect space satellites from solar heat provided by Thales Alenia Space, with which the house created the Prix Bulles Cardin earlier this year, an annual prize rewarding organizations and individuals working towards "a green economy".