Naomi Campbell, Sharon Stone and Alice Cooper offer insights on fashion designer Pierre Cardin

Pierre Cardin in the movie House of Cardin

“I was a young man. I wasn’t Pierre Cardin. I was like everyone else.’’ That’s the Italian-born French fashion designer Pierre Cardin, who turned 98 in July, summing up the time before he became not just a label but a brand.

“The brand,’’ he notes, in response to a question about why he speaks of himself in the third person, “is the third dimension. Ultimately it’s no longer me.”

That’s the younger Cardin speaking, in archival interviews. However the present one is interviewed as well in House of Cardin, and what he has to say is fascinating. It’s that “me”, the man behind the brand, that American filmmaking couple P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes try to find in this absorbing 97-minute documentary.

They do so with a walk-in wardrobe full of interviews with Cardin himself, with proteges such as Jean-Paul Gaultier, models such as Naomi Campbell, artistic friends including Sharon Stone, Alice Cooper and Jean-Michel Jarre and with the people who run his empire, especially his great-nephew Rodrigo Basilicati Cardin, artistic director of the Cardin brand.

Cardin is described as an artist, a futurist, an emperor, a genius, a control freak, a sellout and, most of all, an enigma.

Spliced into this are scenes from Cardin’s extraordinary life, from his 1922 birth (as Pietro) near Venice, to his arrest by the Germans in Vichy France, to his start at the Paris fashion house Paquin in 1945 to his stint with Christian Dior, where he created the costumes for Jean Cocteau’s film Beauty and the Beast, to the establishment of his own label in 1950.

After that, it’s like being on a rocket ship (and Cardin loved the “lunar age”) as he first breaks the rules of high fashion — making ready-to-wear shocked Paris — and then takes his designs to people and places around the world, from The Beatles to the Great Wall of China. It’s all stunningly shot (cinematographer Laurent King) and beautifully put together, almost as though it would be an insult to the man to do anything less. Asked the secret to his longevity, Cardin smiles and says, in English, “Work, work, work.’’

There are engaging diversions into Cardin’s film work and his ownership of the experimental theatre Espace Cardin (Alice Cooper, an early performer, fondly remembers the resulting riot). Cardin says he discovered Gerard Depardieu, who was an extra and a stage hand. There may be a little exaggeration in that, but it’s worth noting that on his 90th birthday Cardin had lunch with the great French actor.

Cardin never married and has no children. It is here, in the interviews, that he is delightfully enigmatic, as a young man and as a 98-year-old. He talks about his friendships with Cocteau and filmmakers Luchino Visconti and Pier Paolo Pasolini. He adds, “I was quite a good looking young man so everyone wanted to sleep with me.’’ The two known loves of his life were French actor Jeanne Moreau (1928-2017) and fashion designer Andre Oliver (1932-1993), who was his right-hand man for four decades. “I like wine and water,’’ today’s Cardin says with a soft smile. “But I don’t mix wine and water.”

This is perhaps the one area of his life that eludes the filmmakers and I am pleased by that. As one of the interviewed fashion experts says, there used to be a time when a person’s private life was private.

There’s a well-known story about how Cardin was refused entry to Maxim’s restaurant in Paris because he was wearing the tuxedo he designed: no collar, no bow-tie. He walked away. Twenty years later he bought the restaurant.

I thought of this when, right at the end of the movie, Cardin, sitting in his garden, is asked to name his favourite bird. His answer is beautiful and, I think, goes to the iconoclastic mindset of Pierre Cardin. This is a colourful, engaging, inspiring documentary about a man who broke rules and refused to accept banality. That makes it a perfect antidote for our times.

3.5 stars

House of Cardin (G) is showing at selected cinemas