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 In a career spanning more than
60 years, Cardin drew scorn and admiration from
fellow fashion designers for his brash business
sense, and influenced catwalks with his
space-age, futuristic bubble dresses and
geometrical cuts and patterns.
Cardin, who was a mentor to designers such as
Jean Paul Gaultier, was active in fashion
circles until the last, still taking young
designers under his wing, attending parties and
events and regularly visiting his Paris office
by Jaguar.
"Thank you Mr Cardin for opening me the doors to
fashion and for making my dream possible,"
Gaultier wrote on Twitter.
Cardin was the first designer to sell clothes
collections in department stores in the late
1950s, and the first to enter the licensing
business for perfumes, accessories and even food
- which later drove profits for many other
fashion houses.
"It's all the same to me whether I am doing
sleeves for dresses or table legs," a telling
quote on his website once read.
Hard as it may be to imagine decades later,
Armani chocolates, Bulgari hotels and Gucci
sunglasses are all based on Cardin's realisation
that a fashion brand's glamour had endless
merchandising potential.
Over the years his name has been stamped on
razor blades, household goods, and tacky
accessories - even cheap boxer shorts.
He once said it would not bother him to have his
initials, PC, etched into rolls of toilet paper,
and he was also the inspiration for a
phallus-like perfume flask.
His detractors accused him of destroying the
value of his brand and the notion of luxury in
general. But he seemed largely unaffected by
criticism.
"I had a sense for marketing my name," Cardin
told Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper in
2007. "Does money spoil one's ideas? I don't
dream of money after all, but while I'm
dreaming, I'm making money. It's never been
about the money."
He maintained that he built his business empire
without ever asking a bank for a loan.
Born near Venice on July 2, 1922, to French
parents of Italian descent, Cardin was educated
in the not-so-glamorous French city of Saint
Etienne.
He went to work for a tailor in nearby Vichy at
age 17 and dreamt for a time of becoming an
actor, doing some work on the stage as well as
modelling and dancing professionally.
'BEAUTY AND THE BEAST'
When he came to Paris in 1945, he made
theatrical masks and costumes for Jean Cocteau's
film, "Beauty and the Beast", and a year later
joined the then-unknown Christian Dior.
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 His first big commercial
venture, when he teamed up with the Printemps
department store in the late 1950s, led to him
being briefly expelled from the rarified guild
of French fashion designers, the Chambre
Syndicale de la Couture.
Couturiers in that club were forbidden at that
time to show outside their Paris salons, let
alone in department stores.
He also blazed a trail outside France long
before other fashion multinationals in search of
new markets. He presented a
collection in Communist China in 1979 when it
was still largely closed to the outside world.
And just two years after the Berlin Wall came
down, in 1991, a Cardin fashion show on Moscow's
Red Square attracted a crowd of 200,000.
Cardin also expanded into new businesses, buying
fabled Paris restaurant Maxim's in the 1980s and
opening replica outlets around the world. He
leveraged the investment further by launching
Minim's, a chain of fancy fast-food joints that
reproduced the Belle Epoque decor of the
original exclusive Paris eatery.
His empire embraces perfumes, foods, industrial
design, real estate, entertainment and even
fresh flowers.
True to his taste for futuristic designs, Cardin
also owns the Palais des Bulles, or Bubble
Palace, a residence-cum-events-venue woven into
the cliffs on one of the most exclusive strips
of the French riviera.
Not too far away, there is also a chateau in the
village of Lacoste that once belonged to the
Marquis de Sade.
In February this year he teamed up with a
designer seven decades his junior.
Pierre Courtial, 27, unveiled a collection at
Cardin's studio on Paris's chic Rue Saint-Honore,
with pieces that echoed some of the veteran
designer's geometrical aesthetics.
Cardin said he still rated originality above
anything else.
"I've always tried to be different, to be
myself," he told Reuters. "Whether people like
it or not, that's not what matters."
(Additional reporting by Henri-Pierre Andre,
Elizabeth Pineau and Matthieu Protard; Editing
by Sonya Hepinstall and Giles Elgood)
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