In a career spanning more than three-quarters of a century, he remained a futurist, reproducing fashions for ready-to-wear consumption and affixing his brand to an outpouring of products.

Pierre Cardin, the visionary designer and licensing pioneer who invented the business of fashion as it is conducted today, has died in France today 29 December, 2020 at the age of 98.

His death was confirmed on Tuesday by the French Academy of Fine Arts. He died at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, just outside Paris, his family said, according to Agence France-Presse.

“Fashion is not enough,” Mr. Cardin once told Eugenia Sheppard, the American newspaper columnist and fashion critic. “I don’t want to be just a designer.”

He never was just that. He clothed the famous — artists, political luminaries, tastemakers and members of the haute bourgeoisie — but he was also a merchant to the masses with an international brand, his name affixed to an outpouring of products, none too exalted or too humble to escape his avid eye.

There were bubble dresses and bath towels, aviator jumpsuits and automobiles, fragrances and ashtrays, even pickle jars.

Planting his flag on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris, he proceeded to turn the country’s fashion establishment on its head, reproducing fashions for mass, ready-to-wear consumption and dealing a blow to the elitism that had governed the Parisian couture.

 “He had this wonderful embrace of technology and was in love with the notion of progress,” said Andrew Bolton, the head curator at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

In 1958, Mr. Cardin put models in crash helmets matched with tiny skirts and colored stockings. He dressed men, and women, in spacesuits.

In 1969, NASA commissioned him to create an interpretation of a spacesuit, a signal inspiration in his later work.

 “The dresses I prefer,” he said at the time, “are those I invent for a life that does not yet exist.”

His designs were influenced by geometric shapes, often rendered in man-made fabrics like silver foil, paper and brightly colored vinyl. The materials would shape the dominant aesthetic of the early 1960s. It was a new silhouette that “denied the body’s natural contours and somehow seemed asexual,” Mr. Bolton said.

“His ability to sculpt fabric with an architectural sensibility was his real signature,” he added.

Mr. Cardin drew inspiration from everywhere, be it the pagodas he visited in China, Op Art painting or automotive design.

“I’m always inspired by something outside, not by the body itself,” he told The New York Times in 1985. Clothing, he said, was meant “to give the body its shape, the way a glass gives shape to the water poured into it.”

Yet his men’s ready-to-wear designs, introduced in 1960, were decidedly more faithful to the body’s outlines. Built on narrow shoulders, high armholes and a fitted waist, they were streamlined and somewhat severe, dispensing in some cases with traditional collars in favor of the simple banded Nehru, a namesake adaptation of the style worn by the Indian prime minister.

Those suits were slow to catch on in the United States — until the Beatles appeared in knockoff versions on the Ed Sullivan television show in 1966.

Cardin was born in Italy in 1922 but moved to France as a child. He began his fashion career in Paris working for firms including Schiaparelli and Dior, and designed the costumes for Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film Beauty and the Beast.

He set up his own fashion boutique in 1950 and made his name with visionary designs like the iconic bubble dress in 1954 and his Space Age collection in 1964, as well as his groundbreaking ready-to-wear collections for both men and women.

New York Times