Pierre Cardin dead: Legendary French fashion designer dies aged 98

Legendary French fashion designer Pierre Cardin has died at the age of 98. 

Over a career spanning seven decades, Cardin was lauded for upending fashion styles and his innovative use of geometric patterns, as well as a savvy business sense that saw his name emblazoned everything on pens to perfumes. 

In the brand’s heyday in the 1970s and ’80s, his products were sold at some 100,000 outlets worldwide, though that number dwindled dramatically in later decades. 

His death was announced in a statement on Tuesday from France’s Fine Arts Academy. 

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 - now a major profit driver for many 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." 

Born in 1922 to French wine merchants in Treviso, Italy, Cardin was the last of 11 children. When he was two-years-old his family fled Benito Mussolini’s facist state and returned to France, where Cardin began working as a clothier’s apprentice aged 14. 

He later left home to work for a tailor in Vichy, and worked for the Red Cross during the Second World War. 

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.