Fashion designer Pierre Cardin remembered in China as a pioneer who inspired brands like LOreal t
The chief representative of Pierre Cardin China, Fang Fang, said the memorial was held for the fashion designer’s Chinese friends and fans to share their memories of his pioneering business moves, which inspired China’s fashion industry.
Cardin was the first Western couturier to stage a fashion show in China in 1979, soon after the country adopted its reform and opening-up policy.
“I was deeply impressed by the sharp contrast between the confident, beautiful and tall models on the stage and the shy audience dressed in blue and green,” said retired journalist Li Anding, who reported on the show, held in the Cultural Palace of Nationalities in Beijing.
French fashion designer Pierre Cardin dies aged 98
Li recalled that the fashion show brought colours to Chinese people’s perception of fashion at that time.
Jerry Zhang, a member of the professional fashion modelling committee of the China Fashion Association, was among dozens of people who attended the memorial on Thursday.
“The success of Pierre Cardin is an epitome of China’s move to embrace the global fashion market after its reform and opening-up starting in 1978. There is no other market in the world like China that can bring so much excitement,” said Jean-Paul Agon, chairman and CEO of the L’Oreal Group.
Over the years, Cardin held many fashion shows in China, setting up stages at Chinese tourist and cultural landmarks such as the Great Wall, Beijing’s Imperial Ancestral Temple and southwest China’s Kunming Stone Forest, as well as the millennium-old Mogao Grottoes in the northwestern city of Dunhuang.
Tu Rong, former deputy editor-in-chief of Shanghai Style magazine, said Pierre Cardin brought Western fashion concepts to China, giving Chinese designers a more professional understanding of clothing, colours and collocation.
Born in 1966, Tu was among the first batch of professional fashion designers to graduate from the China Textile University in the 1990s. The magazine became China’s bestselling fashion magazine in the 1990s.
“Pierre Cardin helped stimulate an expansion of the modelling and brokerage business in China’s fashion industry, which has become a win-win industrial chain linking the East and the West,” she said.
Additional reporting by Xinhua
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