Paco Rabanne: the metallurgist of fashion is dead

The fashion designer, perfumer and businessman Paco Rabanne has just left us at the age of 88, according to information confirmed by the newspaper Le Télégramme. A look back at his extravagant career.

His real name was Francisco Rabaneda y Cuervo, the Spanish designer died this morning in Brittany. More than a simple couturier, he was a true trendsetter, a fashion architect and a visionary, who will mark the Fashionsphere for many years, even centuries.

As Coco Chanel said: “He is not a couturier, he is a metallurgist“. And for good reason. From 1966, Paco Rabanne introduced industrial materials into his creations, which quickly became his trademark. Imitated, never equaled, he was a character out of the ordinary, different from all his other colleagues.

Young Francisco was born in a small Spanish province in 1934. Very quickly, he is confronted with the world of fashion, his mother being first hand at Cristobal Balenciaga. He quickly left his country of birth to come and live in France, the symbol of fashion par excellence. Before touching his first sewing scissors and discovering fabric scraps and materials, he studied architecture at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. To finance his studies, he drew fashion sketches, bag and shoe designs for brands such as Roger Model and Charles Jourdan.

But the young couturier soon abandoned his architecture studies to become totally involved in the world of fashion. Before clothes, Paco Rabanne creates accessories. His eccentric and original creations seduced major fashion houses such as Balenciaga, Courrèges and Nina Ricci.

In 1966, as political conflicts multiplied around the world, Paco Rabanne released his very first Manifesto collection, which he named 12 Importable Dresses in contemporary materials. The sixties are the decade of all the audacity, but also that of the emancipation of women. Goodbye long skirts, make way for minis and pantsuits.

Rabanne frees himself from all the diktats and goes even further with his innovative collection that uses materials such as sequins and rhodoïd plates. It is in this avant-garde and almost cosmic universe that the House of Paco Rabanne was born.