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Pierre Cardin was a pioneer in licensing his name and brand to pretty much anyone, so much so that it ceased to be a demarcator of quality but instead signalled the opposite.
The lesson here, if you want to safeguard a legacy, is to never stop caring about quality and your customers. People with no regard for your reputation will think nothing of destroying it to make a quick buck.
Pierre Cardin’s net worth was apparently 800 million USD according to a quick internet search. That is quite a few bucks. Maybe Pierre Cardin has a couple of lessons to teach us.
For sure, and maybe he didn't give a toss in his later years, but for someone who spent a lifetime developing a reputation for style having his name become synonymous with crap, my guess is he had some regrets.
Ah yes, the regret of being seen unfavorably by Hackernews, I'm sure he was devastated.
Once you get above 2 million it doesn't matter (2 million is enough to shed 70K per year which is widely thought to be the threshold where more money doesn't improve wellbeing).
If money is the motivator after that then you are in a race you can't win.
AFAIK there are many cities where 70K per year is well below comfortable (even if your definition of comfort doesn't imply luxury yachts or cocaine).
Yesterday I have been told $80K is the actual median income but $200K is minimum comfortable in SF (never been to there, can't confirm).
What the 70k figure tells us, is that such an income (adjusting for local conditions) is roughly the inflection point of diminishing returns for basic needs in Maslow's hierarchy.
It isn't so much that people are overall satisfied at 70k, but that people with more are _no less_ satisfied. It is a plateau. Many will still want more and may be unhappy. At that point happiness must be sought by other means (love, community, esteem, self-actualization), which might indeed involve the application of money, but it requires doing something worthwhile (from the perspective of that individual). Something money enables, such as a bigger house isn't enough (by itself).
It isn't that money above 70k doesn't improve wellbeing, but that isn't sufficient by itself to do so.
A million or two allows you to live without working for your money. Five or ten million allow you to have people do anything you don't like doing yourself for you. But beyond that I don't really know what to do with money.
All depends on the life you want.
You can go live on an island in Greece, or Eastern Europe, or Columbia - and 70K in those places will GO FAR:
Housing: Check Nightlife: Check Can't speak for the men, but good looking women: Check Cost of food: Check.
All depends where you want to live and lifestyle you want.
That 70k figure sounds arbitrary and very, very low. It is not even a living wage in many western cities.
I remember buying several clothing items with that name assuming that it was a mockup label used by the store chain for essentially noname/whitelabel products. Never expected that the name could be traced to a licence from an actual person.
Fun fact : in the French version of Back to the Future, Pierre Cardin is the alias Marty takes instead of Calvin Klein.
(and I only learned that yesterday, despite being French I have always watched this movie in English)
funny, in Italian it was "Levi Strauss", I guess cause Levi's jeans were far more popular than CK underwear, I thought we were the only ones who had done this switch.
He was a mad lad. A few years back he purchased a castle once owned by the Marquis de Sade in the town of Lacoste. Cardin liked it so much he started buying up storefronts and houses. He turned some of the houses into businesses. He launched an art festival. He was stopped from adding a golf course. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15789814
A record-shattering #20 on https://deathlist.net :-/
> Below is a list of 50 celebrities which the DeathList committee has selected for their likelihood to pass away during 2020.
Never heard of this before. Seems kind of an incredibly unpleasant thing to build.
Considering their sole description of the Duke of Edinburgh is "casual racist", I think they're having some fun putting this list together.
I find that offensive, some years he worked at it like a job.
Pierre Cardin owned one of the most interesting homes:
- https://www.palaisbulles.com/dream.php
- https://www.challenges.fr/luxe/visite-guidee-du-palais-bulle...
Personally I think it's awful but I fully support his right to be creative.
He was also in the middle of a controversy in France because he "killed" a village, by buying and not using many houses. Even a movie was made about this.
Ah, the king of clothing at Marshall's and Ross.
Not complaining, but I'm surprised this reached the front page. Was Pierre Cardin closer to tech somehow than other famous fashion designers?
Loosely speaking, he was. His work was described as futuristic and space-age, and he did create a concept spacesuit for NASA in 1970.
The NYT obit [1] is nicely done, and its title is well-judged, too, Pierre Cardin, Designer to the Famous and Merchant to the Masses, Dies at 98
Cardin was a businessman almost more than he was a fashion designer; if nowadays we refer to "brands", it has much to do with him.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/style/pierre-cardin-dead....
Thanks for this info :)
As the guidelines state, HN content doesn't have to be tech-related, it just has to gratify intellectual curiosity. Evidently, HN readers find Cardin's career and legacy interesting enough to be worth upvoting and discussing.
It's possible to consider "why has HN found this interesting" without also thinking "this shouldn't be on the site!".
I'm very much onboard with what you wrote, but I too saw this post and wondered what it was about him that took his death to HN's front page.
+1, this is exactly what I meant. Not saying it doesn’t belong but asking why it’s interesting, because I’m sure there is a reason :)
I presume software is eating the world, and Pierre Cardin lived in this part of the wirl
Fashion design appeared (and maybe still appears) to be one those areas where one could easily gain transcending fame and notoriety; catering to elites.
Contrasting it to software or an app (design), the thing could be used by millions and barely anyone knows who you are.
Maybe because fashion designers themselves get to appear on stage and cement their face in everyone's consciousness? Imagine if your software or app would display you, the designer, each time someone starts it up...
Hmmm Mark Zuckerberg comes to mind. The default "friend" for each new facebook account...
I guess I answered my own question?
Fashion is hardly an industry where it is easy to achieve fame or success, let alone "immortal" notoriety like Lagerfeld or Cardin. However, it is true that countries with a lot of luxury fashion houses are more likely to consider fashion as a proper art form than not. That's an important distinction from software. Successful designers are artists and that accounts for something in the way their legacy is celebrated.
Naming companies with founder's name fell out of (ekhm) fashion in business. It used to be Bell, Ford, Disney, Helwett&Packard, now it's Apple, Google, Facebook.
Still, I'd bet an average person knows more famous visionaire/entrepreneur people (like Jobs and Gates) than famous fashion designers.
> I'd bet an average person knows more famous [visionary]/entrepreneur people (like Jobs and Gates) than famous fashion designers.
I doubt that's the case. Popular music cites eponymous fashion brands regularly. Listeners might not know what the actual person looks like, but they'd know the products and the names.
Armani, Chanel, Dior, Lagerfeld, Valentino, Versace
These are the first names that came to my mind. I guess a large majority of people have heard them.
And yet I see faces in my mind when reading Apple, Google, Facebook, but no faces when reading Armani, Dior, Versace. Not even if I try. Of course that's because I'm far more interested web tech than in the fashion establishment. Would be interesting to probe for "brand/face recognition" with people who aren't interested in either, e.g. car or spectator sports nerds.
Because fashion stuff has little to no value itself, the whole 99.9% price is the brand/name. As a fashion designer you become famous first then sell just that if you want to earn big money.
It may have “little to no value” for some, but to others, perhaps many, there is plenty of value. Why else would famous fashion designers and the entire fashion industry be worth so much?
It’s easy to overlook the value but from a basic and utilitarian perspective, the value begins with the quality of materials and the cuts of the fabric. This is not necessarily trivial and takes someone who is skilled with the trade to understand and pioneer. It’s equivalent to a highly skilled carpenter who makes high quality and special furniture. And eventually new techniques, cuts and fabrics will make it to the mainstream.
If this sounds far fetched, some high end fashion (read: ~$150-300 for a sweater) is all about the quality of fabric and the attention to detail in the fit. These items will usually feel better, fit better and last longer. You could think of it as the difference in quality and experience between a Mercedes-Benz and a Toyota. Sure MB probably has much higher markup, but the base cost represents much greater substance as well.
Then there is novelty and this doesn’t necessarily have much to do with the clothes you would wear daily. Fashion designers are artists and the runway shows are often about novel displays in colour, shape and fabric. That’s kind of like a show. People who buy these clothes are making a statement and the markup is very much a reflection of the scarcity of these items. Like a limited edition watch or a very very expensive charity dinner with someone famous.
>read: ~$150-300 for a sweater
Not arguing with you, but that piqued my curiosity. A very long time ago I worked at a high-end men's clothing store and I have a sweater that I paid about $75 for. It retailed for $200. An inflation calculator says that $200 is now worth over $400.
I wonder what an equivalent sweater would cost today. The brand has since gone mainstream, so I can't use them as a point of reference.
99% of the price of Microsoft Office is just the brand name as well.
Is it though? I see whole corporations running in office. Most communication goes through outlook and PowerPoint. I’ve seen people building intricate and bespoke interfaces in Access with only later the data storage layer removed from access internal to ms sql; whole graphs and pivot tables created from many data sources in excel, and even finite state machine simulators integrating real time Prometheus dashboards. Somehow the office suite is extremely powerful and it works and integrates with many things. It may not be pretty but I’ve seen many non(CS)-programmer deliver quite some business value with it.
Art (if one consider fashion art is debatable, but it entails artistic qualities, aesthetics, impressions, emotions) appeals to different part of humans. Or if you will Pierre Cardin's and peers effect is more around what Steve Jobs / Apple was in the tech world. Not utility first .. but something else.
Warning: Something seems really fishy with this website. I carelessly opened it with JS, it locked up my browser and didn't want to close even when I closed the tab, using up a lot of CPU. I had to kill the process. I'm not expert enough to analyze it. Proceed with caution. (Ad blocker was enabled.)
Deutsche Welle is a german public broadcasting corporation, I strongly doubt they'd pull anything fishy.
Deutsche Welle is comparable to the BBC for Germany[0], and they are financed by the German state but stay independent.
It is more a bad website than something else.
Which browser and OS are you using seems fine on my PC