The French fashion designer Pierre Cardin, who died on Dec. 29 at age 98, likely acquired empathy for Jewish customers through his wartime experience as an Italian émigré to France. Cardin, who created futuristic garb for everyone from the Beatles to NASA astronauts, was born Pietro Costante Cardin in the province of Treviso, in the Veneto region of north-eastern Italy. His parents, farm owners, were economically devastated by the First World War. As a result, in 1924, when Cardin was two years old, the family relocated to France. A number of authors and journalists have misleadingly implied that the Cardin family had fled the Fascism of Mussolini’s Italy.