After visiting the Pierre Cardin Exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, I was intrigued by the way the future was envisioned years ago, compared to what it has become, the present. It was so interesting to see how Cardin saw things. Most designer pull their inspiration from their past or present, but what fascinates me most about Cardin is how he had a beautiful and stylish way of envisioning a future, even if it was not the one that would actually become reality. Big, rounded shapes that extended around the body, creating this alien like universe, each and every piece had its own story to tell about the designers wild mind. I also found it interesting that while Cardin did love to design the unimaginable, he also created signature looks for icons like Jacklyn Kennedy.
While it is true that the womenswear was phenomenal, the menswear in particular was interesting to me in this show. The pictures (shown above) are the pieces I was most taken with. I think that these design envision a future that is very other worldly, but at the same time I could absolutely see these designs walking the runways today. The concept of an all black look contrasted with not just colored piping, but florescent lights is very futuristic, very tech, and very interesting. It almost reminds me of similar looks we have seen today, in movies like “Tron”, and a few others. I think that that full body , jumpsuit style of some of the looks is also very outer space, other world like.
To describe the relationship ship between these designs and time and space, I would have to say that the neon lighting is what really connects them. When I was looking at them, the lights are what drew me in, and are what I was able to connect to things in my modern world and relate to, yet just enough to appreciate the avant-garde aspects of the pieces.
However, What intrigued me most about Pierre Cardin, Is how he was able to take this world that he envisions din his head, something that made no sense in his present or past and never actually become a future, and created it to be something beautiful. Its like Megan O’Grady discussed in Fashions For The Future, “as Futurism took hold of the 20th-century imagination, it would become less about functionality or technological innovation than our romance with the notion of the future itself:a fantasy of tomorrow for today.”
Bibliography
O’grady, Megan. “Fashions for the Future.” The New York Times. The New York Times, March 21, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/21/t-magazine/fashion-future-history.html.
Other images from the exhibit that inspired me:
