Pierre Cardin, avant-garde never died!

06/16/2011, we went to the Pierre Cardin Museum, which located far from center Paris. However, the area has such huge space for his museum to display a good amount of his designs from early 50's. I have to say I was familiar with 'Pierre Cardin' as the brand name because it was one the french brands being imported to mainland China in 1980's after the economic reform in 1979. However, I barely saw his fashion designs, neither his industrial design pieces.

The ladies in the museum were really nice and welcomed. One of them was Pierre Cardin's model in the 60's. I have to say unfortunately time carved her beautiful face. She was wearing one of his designs which has circle cut-outs on the bust area and was showing it on the street in an avant-garde fashion show at that time. The tunic A-line dress was displayed in the museum, quietly but vividly.

Pierre Cardin was such a creative designer. He used a lot of geometric shapes and motifs in his garments. Instead showing women's sexy female curve, a good amount of his designs were more of unisex style. His 'space age' designs were really impressive. Even in nowadays those pieces still can be counted as avant-garde designs. Also, he reformed the texture of fabric, inputting some geometric shapes into fabrics using hi-tech machines and chemical devices.

Besides, through observing his designs I found out he used a lot of bonings, horse hairs, and crinolines as the basic frame of garment, in order to achieve some extraordinary silhouettes. He was also good at combining different fabrics, such as sheer beaded chiffon with silk wool, in one evening gown. Some of the garments were some sort of outdated since they have such strong flavor of either the 60's or the 80's style. Some are still gorgeous! I can totally see some celebrities wearing them on the red carpet or for a fashion shoot. 

Speak of Avant-garde, Alexander McQueen is always my favorite! Here is my fashion art and design third semester avant-garde collection. I was inspired by Chinese dragon, which has different characteristics and the power of being whatever it desires. 'Control' and 'Let go' are what I learned from 'Black Swan'. Being a swan queen you have to have the ability of being both pure white swan and evil black swan. Being a fashion designer, similarly, I have to design for certain customers, under certain backgrounds and also have to go out of the box and stretch my imagination out of limitation.