The launch of Sputnik 1 marked the start of the Space Age.^[1]

The signals of Sputnik 1 continued for 22 days.

The Space Shuttle lifts off on a manned mission to space.

The Space Age is a time period encompassing the activities related to the Space Race, space exploration, space technology, and the cultural developments influenced by these events. The Space Age is generally considered to have begun with Sputnik (1957). Furthermore it is argued that this age brought a new dimension to the Cold War.

Beginning[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

The first man-made rocket to breach the boundary of space was a German V-2 rocket (also known as A4) in 1942. Because of its destructive use during World War II it did not gain scientific acknowledgment at the time. Its chief developer Wernher von Braun later became involved with NASA.^[2]

The Space Age began with the development of several technologies that culminated on October 4, 1957, with the launch of Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union. This was the world's first artificial satellite, orbiting the Earth in 98.1 minutes and weighing in at 83 kg. The launch of Sputnik 1 ushered a new era of political, scientific and technological achievements that became known as the Space Age.

The Space Age was characterized by rapid development of new technology in a close race mostly between the US and the Soviet Union. Rapid advances were made in rocketry, materials science, computers and other areas. Much of the technology originally developed for space applications has been spun off and found other uses.

The Space Age reached its peak with the Apollo program, that captured the imagination of much of the world's population. The landing of Apollo 11 was watched by over 500 million people around the world and is widely recognized as one of the defining moments of the 20th century. Since then, public attention has largely moved to other areas. Public perception of the dangers and cost of space exploration in the US was greatly affected by the Challenger disaster in 1986. Public interest in space exploration further faded when the space race came to an end due to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

During the 1990s funding for space related programs fell sharply as the remaining structures of the Soviet Union disintegrated and NASA no longer had any direct competition.

Since then participation in space launches has increasingly widened to more governments and commercial interests. Since the 1990s, the current period has more often been referred to as the Information Age rather than the Space Age, since space exploration and space-related technologies gained a perception by many people of being commonplace.

Current period[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

In the early 21st century, the Ansari X Prize competition was set up to help jump start private spaceflight, which was won by Space Ship One in 2004, becoming the first spaceship not funded by a government agency.

Several countries now have space programs; from related technology ventures to full fledged space programs with launch facilities. There are many scientific and commercial satellites in use today, with a total of hundreds of satellites in orbit, and several countries have plans to send humans into space.

Chronology[link]

Earlier spaceflights[link]

The Space Age might also be considered to have begun much earlier than October 4, 1957, because on October 3, 1942, a German A4 rocket, a prototype version of the V-2 rocket program, reached space. It thus became the first man-made object to enter space, albeit only briefly. Since this flight was undertaken in secrecy, it was not public knowledge for many years afterwards. Further, the German launch, as well as the subsequent sounding rocket tests performed in both the United States and the Soviet Union during the late 1940s and early 1950s, were not considered significant enough to start a new age because they did not reach orbit. Having a rocket powerful enough to reach orbit meant that a nation had the ability to place a payload anywhere on the planet, or to use another term, possessed an inter-continental ballistic missile. The fact that after such a development nowhere on the planet was safe from a nuclear warhead is why the orbit standard is used to define when the space age started.^[3]

See also[link]

Look up space age in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Space exploration
• Space Race
• Spacecraft
• Human spaceflight
• Space probe
• Information Age
• Atomic Age
• Googie architecture (space age design movement)

External sources[link]

• Space Chronology

References[link]

Interactive media[link]

• NASA's 50th Anniversary of the Space Age & Sputnik - Interactive media

Space is the boundless, three-dimensional extent in which objects and events occur and have relative position and direction.^[1] Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless four-dimensional continuum known as spacetime. In mathematics,"spaces" are examined with different numbers of dimensions and with different underlying structures. The concept of space is considered to be of fundamental importance to an understanding of the physical universe. However, disagreement continues between philosophers over whether it is itself an entity, a relationship between entities, or part of a conceptual framework.

Debates concerning the nature, essence and the mode of existence of space date back to antiquity; namely, to treatises like the Timaeus of Plato, or Socrates in his reflections on what the Greeks called khora (i.e. "space"), or in the Physics of Aristotle (Book IV, Delta) in the definition of topos (i.e. place), or even in the later "geometrical conception of place" as "space qua extension" in the Discourse on Place (Qawl fi al-Makan) of the 11th century Arab polymath Alhazen.^[2] Many of these classical philosophical questions were discussed in the Renaissance and then reformulated in the 17th century, particularly during the early development of classical mechanics. In Isaac Newton's view, space was absolute - in the sense that it existed permanently and independently of whether there were any matter in the space.^[3] Other natural philosophers, notably Gottfried Leibniz, thought instead that space was a collection of relations between objects, given by their distance and direction from one another. In the 18th century, the philosopher and theologian George Berkeley attempted to refute the "visibility of spatial depth" in his Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision. Later, the metaphysician Immanuel Kant said neither space nor time can be empirically perceived, they are elements of a systematic framework that humans use to structure all experiences. Kant referred to "space" in his Critique of Pure Reason as being: a subjective "pure a priori form of intuition", hence it is an unavoidable contribution of our human faculties.

In the 19th and 20th centuries mathematicians began to examine non-Euclidean geometries, in which space can be said to be curved, rather than flat. According to Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, space around gravitational fields deviates from Euclidean space.^[4] Experimental tests of general relativity have confirmed that non-Euclidean space provides a better model for the shape of space.

Philosophy of space[link]

Leibniz and Newton[link]

Gottfried Leibniz

In the seventeenth century, the philosophy of space and time emerged as a central issue in epistemology and metaphysics. At its heart, Gottfried Leibniz, the German philosopher-mathematician, and Isaac Newton, the English physicist-mathematician, set out two opposing theories of what space is. Rather than being an entity that independently exists over and above other matter, Leibniz held that space is no more than the collection of spatial relations between objects in the world: "space is that which results from places taken together".^[5] Unoccupied regions are those that could have objects in them, and thus spatial relations with other places. For Leibniz, then, space was an idealised abstraction from the relations between individual entities or their possible locations and therefore could not be continuous but must be discrete.^[6] Space could be thought of in a similar way to the relations between family members. Although people in the family are related to one another, the relations do not exist independently of the people.^[7] Leibniz argued that space could not exist independently of objects in the world because that implies a difference between two universes exactly alike except for the location of the material world in each universe. But since there would be no observational way of telling these universes apart then, according to the identity of indiscernibles, there would be no real difference between them. According to the principle of sufficient reason, any theory of space that implied that there could be these two possible universes, must therefore be wrong.^[8]

Isaac Newton

Newton took space to be more than relations between material objects and based his position on observation and experimentation. For a relationist there can be no real difference between inertial motion, in which the object travels with constant velocity, and non-inertial motion, in which the velocity changes with time, since all spatial measurements are relative to other objects and their motions. But Newton argued that since non-inertial motion generates forces, it must be absolute.^[9] He used the example of water in a spinning bucket to demonstrate his argument. Water in a bucket is hung from a rope and set to spin, starts with a flat surface. After a while, as the bucket continues to spin, the surface of the water becomes concave. If the bucket's spinning is stopped then the surface of the water remains concave as it continues to spin. The concave surface is therefore apparently not the result of relative motion between the bucket and the water.^[10] Instead, Newton argued, it must be a result of non-inertial motion relative to space itself. For several centuries the bucket argument was decisive in showing that space must exist independently of matter.

Kant[link]

Immanuel Kant

In the eighteenth century the German philosopher Immanuel Kant developed a theory of knowledge in which knowledge about space can be both a priori and synthetic.^[11] According to Kant, knowledge about space is synthetic, in that statements about space are not simply true by virtue of the meaning of the words in the statement. In his work, Kant rejected the view that space must be either a substance or relation. Instead he came to the conclusion that space and time are not discovered by humans to be objective features of the world, but are part of an unavoidable systematic framework for organizing our experiences.^[12]

Non-Euclidean geometry[link]

Spherical geometry is similar to elliptical geometry. On the surface of a sphere there are no parallel lines.

Euclid's Elements contained five postulates that form the basis for Euclidean geometry. One of these, the parallel postulate has been the subject of debate among mathematicians for many centuries. It states that on any plane on which there is a straight line L₁ and a point P not on L₁, there is only one straight line L₂ on the plane that passes through the point P and is parallel to the straight line L₁. Until the 19th century, few doubted the truth of the postulate; instead debate centered over whether it was necessary as an axiom, or whether it was a theory that could be derived from the other axioms.^[13] Around 1830 though, the Hungarian János Bolyai and the Russian Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky separately published treatises on a type of geometry that does not include the parallel postulate, called hyperbolic geometry. In this geometry, an infinite number of parallel lines pass through the point P. Consequently the sum of angles in a triangle is less than 180° and the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is greater than pi. In the 1850s, Bernhard Riemann developed an equivalent theory of elliptical geometry, in which no parallel lines pass through P. In this geometry, triangles have more than 180° and circles have a ratio of circumference-to-diameter that is less than pi.

Gauss and Poincaré[link]

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Henri Poincaré

Although there was a prevailing Kantian consensus at the time, once non-Euclidean geometries had been formalised, some began to wonder whether or not physical space is curved. Carl Friedrich Gauss, a German mathematician, was the first to consider an empirical investigation of the geometrical structure of space. He thought of making a test of the sum of the angles of an enormous stellar triangle and there are reports he actually carried out a test, on a small scale, by triangulating mountain tops in Germany.^[14]

Henri Poincaré, a French mathematician and physicist of the late 19th century introduced an important insight in which he attempted to demonstrate the futility of any attempt to discover which geometry applies to space by experiment.^[15] He considered the predicament that would face scientists if they were confined to the surface of an imaginary large sphere with particular properties, known as a sphere-world. In this world, the temperature is taken to vary in such a way that all objects expand and contract in similar proportions in different places on the sphere. With a suitable falloff in temperature, if the scientists try to use measuring rods to determine the sum of the angles in a triangle, they can be deceived into thinking that they inhabit a plane, rather than a spherical surface.^[16] In fact, the scientists cannot in principle determine whether they inhabit a plane or sphere and, Poincaré argued, the same is true for the debate over whether real space is Euclidean or not. For him, which geometry was used to describe space, was a matter of convention.^[17] Since Euclidean geometry is simpler than non-Euclidean geometry, he assumed the former would always be used to describe the 'true' geometry of the world.^[18]

Einstein[link]

Albert Einstein

In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper on a special theory of relativity, in which he proposed that space and time be combined into a single construct known as spacetime. In this theory, the speed of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers—which has the result that two events that appear simultaneous to one particular observer will not be simultaneous to another observer if the observers are moving with respect to one another. Moreover, an observer will measure a moving clock to tick more slowly than one that is stationary with respect to them; and objects are measured to be shortened in the direction that they are moving with respect to the observer.

Over the following ten years Einstein worked on a general theory of relativity, which is a theory of how gravity interacts with spacetime. Instead of viewing gravity as a force field acting in spacetime, Einstein suggested that it modifies the geometric structure of spacetime itself.^[19] According to the general theory, time goes more slowly at places with lower gravitational potentials and rays of light bend in the presence of a gravitational field. Scientists have studied the behaviour of binary pulsars, confirming the predictions of Einstein's theories and non-Euclidean geometry is usually used to describe spacetime.

Mathematics[link]

In modern mathematics spaces are defined as sets with some added structure. They are frequently described as different types of manifolds, which are spaces that locally approximate to Euclidean space, and where the properties are defined largely on local connectedness of points that lie on the manifold. There are however, many diverse mathematical objects that are called spaces. For example, vector spaces such as function spaces may have infinite numbers of independent dimensions and a notion of distance very different to Euclidean space, and topological spaces replace the concept of distance with a more abstract idea of nearness.

Physics[link]

Classical mechanics[link]

Space is one of the few fundamental quantities in physics, meaning that it cannot be defined via other quantities because nothing more fundamental is known at the present. On the other hand, it can be related to other fundamental quantities. Thus, similar to other fundamental quantities (like time and mass), space can be explored via measurement and experiment.

Relativity[link]

Before Einstein's work on relativistic physics, time and space were viewed as independent dimensions. Einstein's discoveries showed that due to relativity of motion our space and time can be mathematically combined into one object — spacetime. It turns out that distances in space or in time separately are not invariant with respect to Lorentz coordinate transformations, but distances in Minkowski space-time along space-time intervals are—which justifies the name.

In addition, time and space dimensions should not be viewed as exactly equivalent in Minkowski space-time. One can freely move in space but not in time. Thus, time and space coordinates are treated differently both in special relativity (where time is sometimes considered an imaginary coordinate) and in general relativity (where different signs are assigned to time and space components of spacetime metric).

Furthermore, in Einstein's general theory of relativity, it is postulated that space-time is geometrically distorted- curved -near to gravitationally significant masses.^[20]

Experiments are ongoing to attempt to directly measure gravitational waves. This is essentially solutions to the equations of general relativity, which describe moving ripples of spacetime. Indirect evidence for this has been found in the motions of the Hulse-Taylor binary system.

Cosmology[link]

Relativity theory leads to the cosmological question of what shape the universe is, and where space came from. It appears that space was created in the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since. The overall shape of space is not known, but space is known to be expanding very rapidly due to the Cosmic Inflation.

Spatial measurement[link]

The measurement of physical space has long been important. Although earlier societies had developed measuring systems, the International System of Units, (SI), is now the most common system of units used in the measuring of space, and is almost universally used.

Currently, the standard space interval, called a standard meter or simply meter, is defined as the distance traveled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of exactly 1/299,792,458 of a second. This definition coupled with present definition of the second is based on the special theory of relativity in which the speed of light plays the role of a fundamental constant of nature.

Geographical space[link]

Geography is the branch of science concerned with identifying and describing the Earth, utilizing spatial awareness to try to understand why things exist in specific locations. Cartography is the mapping of spaces to allow better navigation, for visualization purposes and to act as a locational device. Geostatistics apply statistical concepts to collected spatial data to create an estimate for unobserved phenomena.

Geographical space is often considered as land, and can have a relation to ownership usage (in which space is seen as property or territory). While some cultures assert the rights of the individual in terms of ownership, other cultures will identify with a communal approach to land ownership, while still other cultures such as Australian Aboriginals, rather than asserting ownership rights to land, invert the relationship and consider that they are in fact owned by the land. Spatial planning is a method of regulating the use of space at land-level, with decisions made at regional, national and international levels. Space can also impact on human and cultural behavior, being an important factor in architecture, where it will impact on the design of buildings and structures, and on farming.

Ownership of space is not restricted to land. Ownership of airspace and of waters is decided internationally. Other forms of ownership have been recently asserted to other spaces—for example to the radio bands of the electromagnetic spectrum or to cyberspace.

Public space is a term used to define areas of land as collectively owned by the community, and managed in their name by delegated bodies; such spaces are open to all, while private property is the land culturally owned by an individual or company, for their own use and pleasure.

Abstract space is a term used in geography to refer to a hypothetical space characterized by complete homogeneity. When modeling activity or behavior, it is a conceptual tool used to limit extraneous variables such as terrain.

In psychology[link]

Psychologists first began to study the way space is perceived in the middle of the 19th century. Those now concerned with such studies regard it as a distinct branch of psychology. Psychologists analyzing the perception of space are concerned with how recognition of an object's physical appearance or its interactions are perceived, see, for example, visual space.

Other, more specialized topics studied include amodal perception and object permanence. The perception of surroundings is important due to its necessary relevance to survival, especially with regards to hunting and self preservation as well as simply one's idea of personal space.

Several space-related phobias have been identified, including agoraphobia (the fear of open spaces), astrophobia (the fear of celestial space) and claustrophobia (the fear of enclosed spaces).

See also[link]

	Book: Space
Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print.

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Space

Look up space in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Absolute space and time
• Aether theories
• Cosmology
• Effect of spaceflight on the human body
• General relativity
• Personal space
• Shape of the universe
• Space exploration
• Spatial-temporal reasoning
• Spatial analysis
• Visual space

References[link]

Look up age in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Age may refer to:

• Ageing, the effect of time on a person
• Age (geology)
• Age (model theory), an aspect of mathematical model theory
• Age (journal), an international peer-reviewed journal operated by Springer.
• The Age, a daily newspaper published in Melbourne, Australia
• Agé, a god
• Åge, a given name
• Aage, a given name
• Âge, a Japanese media company
• Advanced glycation end-product, a type of chemical
• American Aging Association or AGE, an organization for aging studies
• Applied general equilibrium, a model in mathematical economics
• Agricultural & General Engineers, a group of engineering companies
• Arterial gas embolism
• Astrological age, a period in western astrology
• Agenore Incrocci or Age, an Italian screenwriter
• Esimbi language or Age, a language of the Cameroons
• Wangerooge Airport's IATA code
• The Age, a nineteenth century American newspaper edited by Melville Fuller

See also[link]

• Senescence, the biological effect of time
• Periodization
• Aging (disambiguation)
• AIG (disambiguation)
• AG (disambiguation)

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Mort Garson (20 July 1924^[1] – 4 January 2008)^[2] who was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, was an electronic musician best known for his albums that predominantly feature Moog synthesizers.

Early life[link]

Mort Garson studied music at Juilliard and worked as a pianist and arranger before getting pulled into the Army near the end of World War Two. He could carry out any or all of the musical chores on any given session: composer, arranger, orchestrator, conductor, and even pianist if that was required. He conducted the "Love Strings" on Liberty Records, arranged for the Lettermen on Capitol Records, provided background to Laurence Harvey reading poetry on Atlantic Records, accompanied Doris Day on Columbia and experimented with the Moog synthesizer on A&M Records, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. With lyricist Bob Hilliard, he wrote one of the great lounge hits of the 1960s, "Our Day Will Come" originally written by Columbus Mitchell, a hit for Ruby & The Romantics and more recently covered by K. D. Lang and Take 6 for the soundtrack of the movie Shag.

Early career[link]

Garson spent the mid-1960s on a rapid succession of accompaniment jobs: two Doris Day albums (Sentimental Journey and Songs for Latin Lovers), Mel Tormé's Right Now! album of contemporary covers like "Secret Agent Man," Glenn Yarborough's highly successful cover of Rod McKuen songs, The Lonely Things, and Glen Campbell's even more successful "By the Time I Get to Phoenix." He also appears to have been a favorite of producers when the job involved soft pop vocal groups and string ensembles, since his handiwork appears on albums and singles by the Lettermen, the Sandpipers, the Sugar Shoppe, the Hollyridge Strings, the Sunset Strings, and the Love Strings.

Highly prized albums among collectors and exotica fans are Garson's electronic albums from the mid to late 1960s. The Zodiac : Cosmic Sounds - Celestial Counterpoint with Words and Music, a suite of Garson originals released on Elektra Records includes tracks for each of the 12 signs of the zodiac, and features Paul Beaver on a variety of electronic instruments with voice-overs by Cyrus Faryar. Zodiac was the first album recorded on the West Coast to make use of Robert Moog's new Moog synthesizer. Another moog album, Electronic Hair Pieces, covered songs from the hippie-influenced musical, Hair. The mod album cover art for Electronic Hair Pieces featured a model with a wired-up skull; liner notes were provided by Tom Smothers of the Smothers Brothers. Another album, The Wozard of Iz, a psychedelic satire based on The Wizard of Oz featured Bernie Krause providing a rich array of environmental sound effects and Suzy Jane Hokum voicing Dorothy. (The widely repeated claim 'Suzy Jane Hokum' is a pseudonym for Nancy Sinatra is untrue.)

With the success of the original Zodiac LP, Garson went on to compose and arrange a 12 album series of zodiac albums for A&M Records, one album for each sign. Like Zodiac, each album contained original tunes with heavy use of electronics. In 1974, Mort Garson composed the electronic music score for the 18th Annual Grammy Award winning Best Children's Recording of The Little Prince narrated by Richard Burton. Plantasia, which was released in 1976, was an album of Moog compositions to be played for growing plants. Garson also released a record of music-and-moans to capitalize on the best-seller at the time, The Sensuous Woman by "Z". He wrote an electronic Black Mass album under the pseudonym Lucifer that again featured the Moog. Garson followed Black Mass with an album titled Ataraxia designed to accompany meditations to the mantra of the listener's choice.

Film composer[link]

Garson also worked in television and film, scoring a wide variety of music for many different movies and TV shows, from Beware! The Blob! to Kentucky Fried Movie to National Geographic specials, although it is Elmer Bernstein who is credited with composing the well-known National Geographic orchestral theme that first appeared in on the magazine's TV specials in 1966.

Garson was very closely associated with Heatter-Quigley Productions, creating the theme songs and music cues for the following TV game shows:

• "Amateur's Guide to Love"
• "Gambit"
• "Runaround"
• "Baffle"
• "The Magnificent Marble Machine"
• "Battlestars"

The music for the first five featured Garson playing synthesizers, but the Battlestars package used more conventional marching band orchestration.

Musical Theatre composer[link]

Garson composed the score for the West End musical Marilyn!, which opened at the Adelphi theatre on 17 March 1983. Jaques Wilson wrote the lyrics for the show which starred Stephanie Lawrence as Marilyn Monroe.

Cultural references[link]

A sample from Garson's "Planetary Motivations (Cancer)" was incorporated into DJ Shadow's 1996 song "Building Steam with a Grain of Salt," from the album Endtroducing......

The song "Exchange" was covered by Massive Attack on their 1998 album Mezzanine.

Discography[link]

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

• Undecided Man (with Paul Revere & The Raiders from The Spirit of '67, arranged and conducted orchestra) (CBS, 1966)
• Hollyridge Strings - The Beatles Songbook Vol.4 (Capitol Records, 1967) co-arranger/conductor (with Perry Botkin, Jr.)
• The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds (Elektra Records, 1967)
• Symphony For Soul - Total Eclipse (Liberty Records LP-9353 1967)
• Sea Drift (with Dusk 'Til Dawn Orchestra) (Elektra, 1967)
• Hollyridge Strings - The Beatles Songbook Vol.5 (The Hollyridge Strings play Magical Mystery Tour) (Capitol Records, 1968) arranger/conductor
• The Wozard of Iz: An Electronic Odyssey (Elektra, 1968)
• Electronic Hair Pieces (A&M Records, 1969)
• Signs of the Zodiac (12 LP) (A&M Records, 1969) U.S. #147^[3]
• Arthur Prysock - This is My Beloved (Verve Records, 1969) composer/conductor
• Black Mass Lucifer (1971)
• The Little Prince: Narrated by Richard Burton (1974)
• Ataraxia: The Unexplained (Electronic Musical Impressions of the Occult) (RCA Records, 1975)
• Plantasia (1976)
• Julie Knows -- Sung by Randy Sparks, Columbia 4-43138. Garson credited with arrangement and conducting.

Note[link]

References[link]

• Associated Press (2008-01-08). "Composer Mort Garson dies at 83" (HTML). Variety. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117978685.html?categoryid=16&cs=1&nid=2568. Retrieved 2008-01-09. 
• Jaques Cattell Press (ed.) (1980). ASCAP Biographical Dictionary (4th edition ed.). R.R. Bowker Co. p. 177. ISBN 0-8352-1283-1. http://books.google.com/books?id=-1kYAAAAIAAJ&q=Mort+Garson&dq=Mort+Garson&lr=&pgis=1. Retrieved 2008-01-09. 

Pierre Cardin
Cardin with French actress Nora Arnezeder, 2009.
Born	(1922-07-07) 7 July 1922 (age 89) San Biagio di Callalta, Italy
Nationality	French
Occupation	Fashion designer

Pierre Cardin (French pronunciation: [pjɛʁ kaʁdɛ̃]), born Pietro Cardin, is an Italian-born French fashion designer who was born on 7 July 1922, at San Biagio di Callalta near Treviso.

Cardin was known for his avant-garde style and his Space Age designs. He prefers geometric shapes and motifs, often ignoring the female form. He advanced into unisex fashions, sometimes experimental, and not always practical. He introduced the "bubble dress" in 1954.

Pierre Cardin was also designated UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in 1991.^[1]

On 16 October 2009, Pierre Cardin was nominated Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).^[2]

Career[link]

Pierre Cardin dress, 1967

Cardin moved to Paris in 1945. There, he studied architecture and worked with the fashion house of Paquin after the war. He worked with Elsa Schiaparelli until he became head of Christian Dior's tailleure atelier in 1947, but was denied work at Balenciaga.

Cardin founded his own house in 1950. His career was launched when he designed about 30 of the costumes for "the party of the century", a masquerade ball at Palazzo Labia in Venice on 3 September 1951, hosted by the palazzo's owner, Carlos de Beistegui. He began with haute couture in 1953.

Cardin was the first couturier to turn to Japan as a high fashion market when he travelled there in 1959.

In 1959, he was expelled from the Chambre Syndicale for launching a ready-to-wear collection for the Printemps department store as the first couturier in Paris, but was soon reinstated.

Pierre Cardin - Cobra Table and Chair

Cardin resigned from the Chambre Syndicale in 1966 and began showing his collections in his own venue, the "Espace Cardin" (opened 1971) in Paris, formerly the "Théâtre des Ambassadeurs", near the Embassy of the United States in Paris. The Espace Cardin is also used to promote new artistic talents, like theater ensembles, musicians and others. He was also contacted by Pakistan International Airlines to design uniforms for the flag carrier. The uniforms were introduced in 1966 to 1971 and became an instant hit.^[3]

In 1971, Cardin redesigned the Barong Tagalog, a national costume of the Philippines by opening the front, removing the cuffs that needed cufflinks, flaring the sleeves, and minimizing the embroidery. It was also tapered to the body, in contrast with the traditional loose-fitting design; it also had a thicker collar with sharp and pointed cuffs. A straight jacket design was favored by President Ferdinand Marcos.^[4]

Cardin was a member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture et du Prêt-à-Porter from 1953 to 1993.

Like many other designers today, Cardin decided in 1994 to show his collection only to a small circle of selected clients and journalists. After a break of 15 years, he showed a new collection to a group of 150 journalists at his bubble home in Cannes.

Automobiles[link]

Cardin interior in a 1972 Javelin

Cardin expanded into other markets that included a contract with American Motors Corporation (AMC) following the success of the Aldo Gucci designed Hornet Sportabout station wagon interiors. The automaker incorporated Cardin's daring and outlandish design "with some of the wildest fabrics and patterns ever seen in any American car" on the 1972 and 1973 AMC Javelins.^[5] The original sales estimate was for 2,500 haute couture muscle cars.^[6]

A total of 4,152 AMC Javelins received a bold mirrored multi-colored pleated stripe pattern in tones of Chinese red, plum, white, and silver set against a black background. This was one of the first few American cars to offer a special trim package created by a famous fashion designer. The Cardin Javelins also came with the designer's emblems on the front fenders and had a limited selection of exterior colors (Trans Am Red, Snow White, Stardust Silver, Diamond Blue, and Wild Plum) to coordinate with the special interiors.^[7]

Other interests[link]

Cardin bought Maxim's restaurants in 1981 and soon opened branches in New York, London, and Beijing (1983). A chain of Maxim's Hotels are now included in the assets. He has also licensed a wide range of food products under that name.

In 2001, Cardin purchased the ruins of the castle in Lacoste, Vaucluse that was once inhabited by the Marquis de Sade; he has partially renovated the site and holds music festivals there.^[8]

Cardin also owns a palazzo in Venice named Ca' Bragadin. Although Cardin has claimed in several interviews that this house was once owned by Giacomo Casanova, in reality it was the home of Giovanni Bragadin di San Cassian, bishop of Verona and Patriarch of Venice.

In 2003, Cardin invited the award-winning Chechen children's dance ensemble, Lovzar, to dance in his musical show "Tristan and Isolde", performed in Moscow.

Biography[link]

• Sylvana Lorenz, Biographie de Pierre Cardin (Paris: éditions Calmann-Lévy, 2006) (French)

References[link]

• Hesse, Jean-Pascal (2010). Pierre Cardin: 60 Years of Innovation. Assouline. ISBN 978-2-7594-0424-7. 

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Pierre Cardin

• Pierre Cardin official website
• Pierre Cardin designer profile at Fashion Model Directory
• Sculptures Utilitaires by Pierre Cardin
• Pierre Cardin rare interview
• Pierre Cardin Palais Bulles
• Pierre Cardin Museum
• Pierre Cardin the man behind Maxim's
• Pierre Cardin and the Art Nouveau
• Sewing patterns by Pierre Cardin
• FAO Goodwill Ambassador website
• "Interactive timeline of couture houses and couturier biographies". Victoria and Albert Museum. http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1486_couture/explore.php.