Pierre Cardin opens SoHo shop to court US licensees

Pierre Cardin launches a dual-purpose site in Manhattan's SoHo neighbourhood on Wednesday, its first showroom in the United States in many years. It will serve the public as a shop and as a showroom to attract prospective licensees to the 76-year-old Paris-based brand.

The space carries a curated edit of the house's output: eyewear, ties, handbags, fragrance, 3D-printed T-shirts and a small couture line. Partners and sales teams can see what Pierre Cardin stands for there, with the larger goal of signing new manufacturers as long-term licensing partners.

Rodrigo Basilicati-Cardin, the designer and president who is great-nephew of the late founder, framed the point bluntly. "I would like to boost our network of licensees in the U.S.," he said. Furniture, jeans, lifestyle athleisure wear and certain accessories are the categories he wants to add.

A return to a market it once led

The house already has licensees producing approximately 800 different items, and the business generated about 600 million euros last year. Pierre Cardin, who died in 2020 at 98, was a pioneer in licensing, and it is still central to the model.

Not everything is licensed. Cardin designs and produces in-house a couture collection twice a year, along with some accessories. The company calls the SoHo launch a turning point for the brand in North America.

The company said it has signed six new licences covering men's, activewear, shoes, accessories, sportswear and leisurewear, plus a new international fragrance licence. None of the terms or licensee names were given.

"The House has 130 active licenses worldwide, and the ambition is to take Pierre Cardin beyond the heights it reached in North America in the 1970s," Basilicati-Cardin said. That decade is the standard the brand is measuring itself against.

In the 1980s Cardin opened a corporate office at 53 East 57th Street in New York, which served as a showroom and as the base for managing American licensing. The SoHo site revives that arrangement in a form the public can also walk into.

How the licensing push will work

Matthew Gonder, the brand's US and Canada licensing agent, is the executive most likely to use the space. A central meeting place lets him and other Cardin officials see suppliers regularly and eliminates much of the travel they previously did.

Basilicati-Cardin pointed to his uncle's original reasoning. "It was the idea of my uncle originally to not design super high-priced luxury. He said that the real potential for business is for medium-priced design, to design for everyone," he said.

Retail remains deliberately tiny. The house runs one boutique in Paris at 59 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and its only other store is a licensed outlet in Tsawwassen Mills in British Columbia. There are no plans for additional stores in the United States.

US customers can buy Pierre Cardin online through Amazon, but the brand does not otherwise wholesale in the country. Licensed stores operated in the US many years ago, though none do now, so the showroom is the brand's main American presence.

Pierre Cardin is credited with originating the Space Age aesthetic in the 1960s. The spring 2027 show, held earlier this month at a Paris skating rink, put technicity first, drawing on work with the European Space Agency.

That work involved designing suits astronauts use for training ahead of future moon missions. Basilicati-Cardin said some of the solutions found for those suits were adopted for use on Earth, and they now feed into the collection.

The test is whether showroom visits turn into signed partners. Basilicati-Cardin has named the categories he wants, from furniture to jeans, and the SoHo space is the tool he has built to reach manufacturers who could make them.

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Images: Courtesy of Pierre Cardin; Pierre Cardin