Fashion’s ‘visionary’ Rabanne dies at 88
SPANISH fashion designer Paco Rabanne, best known for his perfumes and spaceage metallic outfits, has died at his home aged 88.
Alongside French couturiers Pierre Cardin and Andre Courreges, he helped upset the Paris fashion press, who branded him an “enfant terrible”. His death was announced by Puig, who own his fashion brands, and said Rabanne had “marked generations with his radical vision of fashion”. A statement on his Instagram account said: “The House of Paco Rabanne wishes to honour our visionary designer and founder...
“Among the most seminal fashion figures of the 20th century, his legacy will ICONIC Jane Fonda in Barbarella
remain a constant source of inspiration. We are grateful to Monsieur Rabanne for establishing our avant-garde heritage and defining a future of limitless possibilities.”
Puig’s fashion president,
Jose Manuel Albesa, praised Rabanne’s eccentric designs, saying: “Who else could induce fashionable Parisian women to clamour for dresses made of plastic and metal? That radical, rebellious spirit set him apart: There is only one Rabanne.”
Born in 1934 in the
Basque Country, he escaped the Spanish
Civil War by fleeing to
France at the age of five with his mother, a head seamstress at Balenciaga.
He initially studied architecture at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-arts in Paris and began his fashion career in the early 1960s with a collection of large plastic accessories.
For his debut couture collection in 1966, he presented “12 unwearable dresses in contemporary materials”, which included a chainmailinspired minidress made of aluminium plates which caused uproar.
Despite this, his designs quickly became favourites with celebrities including Brigitte Bardot and Twiggy.
He soon connected with the cinema world too, designing the iconic costumes for Jane Fonda in 1968 cult classic Barbarella.
Rabanne also had commercial success with his range of perfumes. His debut fragrance, Calandre, is still available while Lady Million, with its eye-catching gold-capped bottle, remains a best-seller.
His designs have been consistently worn by stars such as Beyonce and Taylor Swift.
Always an innovator, Rabanne was one of the first perfumers to launch one of his products online in the mid-1990s.
But he was also known for his provocative outbursts. At various stages, he claimed to have had multiple lives, to have been some 78,000 years old, to have seen God and been visited by aliens.
“I have always had the impression of being a time accelerator,” he said of his designs in 2016. “Of going as far as is reasonable for one’s time and not indulge in the morbid pleasure of the known things, which I view as decay.”
In 1999, Rabanne retired from fashion. Over the next 24 years, he was rarely seen in public.