The Spaniard is one of the inventors of futuristic fashion, which he prefers to make from small metal plates. Now Paco Rabanne has died.
1999: Paco Rabanne, here at a show, preferred to work with non-fashion materials.Imago Images
Whoever hears his name will probably first think of the olfactory pleasures. Rather than his textile arts. Paco Rabanne – these are spicy, heavy fragrances, “old men’s perfumes” that are much better known today than his clothes. Together with the Spanish cosmetics group Puig, which has owned the entire Paco Rabanne brand for several years, the designer brought fragrances onto the market from 1969. By then he had long since become a fashion star.
Along with the French André Courrèges and Pierre Cardin, Rabanne was considered an inventor of futuristic fashion from 1963. It is true that fashion always has a duty to think ahead – but it has never ventured as far as in this decade. Courrèges’ geometric cutting solutions; Cardin’s op art prints; a Rabanne who assembles armored clothing from chains and small metal plates – the three may have found their theme in the wake of the “Space Age”, the space age of the early 1960s.
However, Paco Rabanne’s fascination with sculptures of dresses probably also had its roots in his architecture studies: the Spaniard, born in 1934 in the Basque country, spent twelve years in Paris dealing with the art of building; a passion for angular shapes and hard materials was later reflected in his fashion. After making accessory sketches for the French shoe manufacturer Charles Jourdan during his student days, Rabanne then worked as a freelance fashion illustrator; for Hubert de Givenchy for example, also for Cardin and Courrèges.
1968: Jane Fonda’s Barbarella costumes were by Rabanne.Imago Images
1965 turned out to be a decisive year for his own fashion creations: Rabanne used the transparent plastic Rhodoïd for the first time to make costume jewellery. This was well received in the Parisian scene – the Spaniard opened his own studio that same year. “12 robes importables en matériaux contemporains” is the title of his first complete fashion collection – “12 unwearable dresses made of contemporary materials”.
Plastic and metal would always remain the things that particularly fascinated him, and less often cardboard and paper too, untypical, non-fashionable materials anyway. Rabanne’s best-known models still include the many different chain mail dresses, composed of thousands of shimmering metal plates. “Plumber of fashion” – that’s what they called him in Paris at the time, the biting Coco Chanel even spoke of the mean “metal worker”.
1969: His most famous models consisted of countless small metal plates.Imago Images
Rabanne’s international breakthrough came only through an engagement in the film business: in 1968 he had designed the costumes for “Barbarella” – Jane Fonda’s skin-tight one-piece suits, sometimes with silvery details, sometimes with circular peepholes, came from Paco Rabanne. However, it was only a few years as a celebrated genius that followed for him.
As early as the mid-1970s, it was said that the designer only reproduced, sometimes even satirized, his old works. It was said at the time that there were no new ideas. Although its importance in the fashion industry had dropped drastically in the following decade at the latest, a potent buyer for the Paco Rabanne fashion brand had been found in the Puig group in 1987. At this point, this already consisted of prêt-à-porter for men and women, a haute couture line and the fragrances.
From 1999, Paco Rabanne gradually withdrew from the fashion house that still bears his name today. In his later years, he is said to have focused primarily on the esoteric, one of his many interests, which also included constructivism and science fiction—anything to do with futurism, the fantasy, and the fantastic.
At the age of seven, Rabanne wrote in a biography decades earlier, he experienced a supernatural vision. He had seen the future, which he was later to deal with so intensively in terms of fashion. Now Paco Rabanne has died in France, as the Puig company announced. He was 88 years old.