World News for Students of English

04-01-2021 15:00

The legendary French couturier Pierre Cardin died on Tuesday last week at the age of 98.

Cardin made his career by selling designer clothes to the masses, and he made his fortune by being the first to use his name as a brand for selling everything from cars to perfume.

Cardin was born in 1922 in a small town in northeast Italy to French parents of Italian descent; however, his family relocated to France to escape fascism.

Cardin started his career making theatrical masks and costumes for the film ’Beauty and the Beast’. In 1946, he was hired as a tailor by Christian Dior who had just opened his couture house in Paris. Four years later, at the age of 28, Cardin founded his own fashion brand. He was the first designer to sell collections in department stores in the late 1960s, and he was among the first foreign designers to open shop in Japan, China, and Russia.

Difficult words: couturier (a person or business that designs and makes fashionable clothes for women), fascism (a political regime that dominated Central, Southern and Eastern Europe between 1919 and 1945), couture house (the business of designing and making expensive fashionable clothes).

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