After seeing Matthieu Blazy’s clever reboot of Chanel Monday night, one might have sat front row at the Pierre Cardin show wondering, what could be done to make this brand feel current?

The entire collection, designed by Cardin’s nephew and chosen heir Rodrigo Basilicati, was built on the foundations of black or white back-zipped catsuits for both men and women, garments that felt lifted straight from “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

Modular pieces unfolded from various wearable compartments attached to the suits, such as an orange bib cascading down the front, green fans velcroed to the shoulders and extending out like a flying gurnard fish, or undulating yellow waves protruding from the hips.

Watching the series of somewhat baffling looks come down the runway in the brand’s flagship on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, another question to be asked is, “What modern person would wear these clothes?”

And the answer is: it doesn’t matter.

Basilicati is designing for the future. Not the utopian future his uncle once imagined (the flying-car Space Age we should be in by now) but one shaped by climate collapse and human migration.

He is preparing for a world 50 years ahead, one where the ice caps have melted and humans must live on the water. The catsuits, he explained, are envisioned as temperature-regulated, allowing wearers to conserve energy otherwise spent heating or cooling their homes.

He’s also not designing with the average consumer in mind. While there were some attendees wearing the brand’s signature tilted halo hats, or a great glimmering gold coat from the fall 2024 collection, the runway show was positioned less for fashion customers and more for Cardin’s licensees.

The house currently has over 140 worldwide, 100 of whom were in the audience Tuesday night, Basilicati said.

“I can inspire my licensees with the shapes,” he said backstage after the show.

Many of those licensees are based in Asia. And according to a highly informal poll of those in attendance (sample size of three), the collection could be a hit. They said the Asian market, which associates Cardin with 1980s-era gray business suits that their dads wore, feels this collection is new (even if that newness echoes the futurism Cardin was designing in the 1960s, which they aren’t familiar with). In China, they said, it feels fresh. Ditto in Korea, where the designs could resonate with pop performers.

That positive reception is precisely why Basilicati plans to re-stage the show in China next month, with a visit to partners in Vietnam soon after.