Paris: Pierre Cardin turns 84 this week, but he has no intention of retiring.
The veteran French designer, the head of a global empire that ranges from ready-to-wear to the restaurant chain Maxim's, continues to sketch outfits every day.
"What am I going to do, wait for death? There's no point. It will come quickly enough," Cardin said as he showed reporters around a gallery in the trendy Marais district, where he was holding his first men's ready-to-wear presentation in 10 years.
Tugging at a jacket on a dummy, he pointed out the slits cut in the back and explained that he had been thinking about ventilation—a timely concept as Parisians swelter through a heat wave.
Circle-cut sleeves and snap fasteners made for a geometric silhouette with a retro feel.
Cardin, who is celebrating six decades in fashion, grabbed headlines in the 1960s with his Space Age designs that heralded a new freedom of movement for women.
He was the first to present a ready-to-wear collection in 1959, revolutionizing the way fashion was manufactured and purchased. In 1979, he became the first Western couturier to present his collections in China.
Since then, he has becoming a roving ambassador for French style, meeting leaders from the late Pope John Paul II to Fidel Castro.
"If you go to a village 20 km from Jakarta and you ask the people if they have heard of Pierre Cardin, they will answer yes," said Edouard Saint Bris, international director of the brand. "He has always been a precursor."
Familiarity with the Cardin label is due in large measure to the unprecedented number of licenses he has granted manufacturers to make clothing and accessories under his name _ more than 800 at last count.
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He stopped staging catwalk shows after his licensees complained that the designs were being copied by counterfeiters faster than they could produce them.
But Cardin has steadily churned out new designs, amassing some 12,000 pieces in a private collection he hopes to put on public display someday. His more immediate concern is finding a worthy buyer for his business.
"I want to sell while I am still relatively well preserved. I don't want to wait to be doddery," he explained. "I have had many offers, I could have sold it a very, very long time ago, but I am very demanding."
He plans to stay on even after a sale ''because without me, it obviously does not have the same value.''
That puts him at odds with today's luxury conglomerates and their designers-for-hire. Indeed, Cardin has little respect for today's young couturiers, who spend hours in vintage stores and museums researching their collections.
''What I do is not copied from someone, or another era, a style or a country,'' he said. ''I don't copy others _ I try to be copied.''
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