Pierre Cardin feud tears village apart
Fashion designer Pierre Cardin has upset the locals in the French village of Lacoste, by buying the Marquis de Sade’s famous castle and 22 more properties.
It’s been called the most ravishing village in France - literally.
Lacoste was once the home of the champion debauchee, the Marquis de Sade. In the hilltop chateau, he staged his famous orgies and flagellations, with local girls procured for his enjoyment.
Two-and-a-half centuries later, Lacoste is ravishing in the other sense. Steep cobbled streets and ancient houses lend an archetypal beauty.
This part of the Luberon has always drawn eminent outsiders. For many years, Tom Stoppard had a home in Lacoste and John Malkovich owns a farm in the vineyards below. Peter Mayle - of A year in Provence fame - lives a few miles away.
But it is the fashion designer, Pierre Cardin, who has left by far the deepest imprint on Lacoste. Indeed for many locals, the Cardin mark is too deep. They wish he would go away.
It was in 2001 that the veteran couturier acquired De Sade’s castle, which he in part restored and now sometimes lives in.
He erected modernist sculptures and launched an annual theatre festival in an abandoned Roman quarry.
Cardin then set about also buying up large parts of the actual village. Today he owns 22 houses along the Rue Basse - Lower Street - as well as a boulangerie and a cafe.
Several of the houses he has converted into futuristic art galleries, and others into guest houses. Most of the time they are empty of visitors.
Cardin’s acquisitive coup de force provoked major ructions among the Lacostois.
The village has a long tradition of feuding, and reactions to this cosmopolitan interloper have been bitterly divisive.
Some say he has destroyed the community by spraying his money and driving up prices. For others, he is a generous philanthropist who provides much-needed local employment.
Now aged 89, Cardin himself says he is impervious to the attacks to which he is subjected.
“Personally I pay no attention to what the people say. They are just jealous,” he tells me in an interview.
Pierre Cardin Cardin is known for his avant-garde work
“After all, what have they ever done for Lacoste? Absolutely nothing.”