Paco Rabanne, the Spanish-born designer known for world-selling perfumes and space-age metallic fashions, has died, the group that owns his fashion house announced on its website on Friday.
“The House of Paco Rabanne wishes to honor our visionary designer and founder who passed away today at the age of 88. His legacy will remain among the most influential fashion figures of the 20th century,” the beauty and fashion company said in a statement. Puig. .
Le Telegramme newspaper quoted Vannes mayor David Robo as saying Rabanne died at his home in the Brittany city of Portsall.
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The fashion house of Rabanne shows its collections in Paris and is scheduled to present the brand’s latest ready-to-wear designs during the upcoming fashion week from February 27 to March 3.
He was known as a rebellious designer in a career that blossomed with his collaboration with the family business Puig, a Spanish firm that now also owns other design houses, including Nina Ricci, Jean Paul Gaultier, Caroline Herrera, and Dries Van Noten. The company also owns the fragrance brands Byredo and Penhaligon’s.
Fashion designer Paco Rabanne thanks the applause at the end of his fall-winter collection March 3, 2000 in Paris, France.
(AP Photo/Remy de la Mauviniere, file)
“Paco Rabanne made transgression magnetic. Who else could induce fashionable Parisian women to clamor for dresses made of plastic and metal? Who but Paco Rabanne could imagine a fragrance called Calandre (the word means ‘grill of automobile’, you know) and become an icon of modern femininity?” the group’s statement said.
Calandre perfume was launched in 1969, the first Puig product in Spain, France and the United States, the company reports.
Born Francisco Rabaneda y Cuervo in 1934, the future designer fled the Spanish Basque Country at age 5 during the Spanish Civil War and took the name Paco Rabanne.
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He studied architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris before turning to haute couture, following in the footsteps of his mother, who was a dressmaker in Spain. She said that at one point she was jailed for dressing in a “shocking” way.
He sold accessories to well-known designers before launching his own collection.
She titled the first collection presented under her own name “12 Useless Dresses in Contemporary Materials.” His innovative outfits were made of various types of metal, including his famous use of chain mail, the chain-like material associated with medieval knights.
Coco Chanel reportedly called Rabanne “the metallurgist of fashion.”
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“My colleagues tell me that I am not a dressmaker but a craftsman, and it is true that I am a craftsman… I work with my hands,” he said in an interview in the 1970s.
In an interview given when he was 43 and now held at France’s National Audiovisual Institute, Rabanne explained his radical philosophy of fashion,
“I think fashion is prophetic. Fashion heralds the future,” she said, adding that women were harbingers of what is coming on the horizon.
“When the hair is inflated, the regimens fall,” said Rabanne. “When the hair is soft, everything is fine.”
