PACO RABANNE: 1934-2023
Paco Rabanne 1934 - 2023, remembered by Tony Glenville
A legend passes - but his work remains an important and unique creative statement that helped define the 1960’s. Paco Rabanne was the last remaining link with the first generation of couturiers who looked to the space age, and the future of fashion. Pierre Cardin, Andre Courreges, Emanual Ungaro, Jean Marie Armand were all designers whose work reflected a faster life, a new client, a night club girl, a pop music lover, a woman with a busy life. Jet set.
The Paco Rabanne iconic dress, formed out of thousands of metal discs held together with tiny links was so chic that Audrey Hepburn wore one in the Movie ‘Two for the Road’, 1967, and he was responsible for the extraordinary outfits, many in plastics and synthetic materials, worn by Jane Fonda in Roger Vadim’s ‘Barbarella’,1968.
Paco Rabanne wasn’t French, he was Spanish and with his Latin attitude he effortlessly melded futurism and sexiness, couture and new methods. Born in the Basque region of Spain his mother was a senior seamstress at Balenciaga, however following the murder of his father during the Spanish Civil War they moved to Paris, where he studied architecture at the Ecole Nationale Superior des Beaux-Arts. He earned extra money as a student designing fashion, but on graduation spent a decade working on in construction. This knowledge and attention to the forms within construction influenced his creativity immensely.
After a few years working with other designers and learning the art of constructing hand bags, in 1966 he opened his own house. He made dresses and looks from materials such as aluminum, rhodoid, neoprene, plexiglass, leather and feathers. They formed a striking couture signature. Highly marketable. Fragrance too played a major part in the establishment of the house as a global name, with XS and Paco Rabanne selling to millions of customers worldwide. His rise coincided with the massive development of French ready to wear and the increased use of synthetic fabrics, many with a shiny wet look. This wasn’t just in fashion, modernity in architecture was also changing the face of Paris from Tour Montparnasse to Parly 2. The development of these new modern materials made it possible for designers such as Christian Lacroix and Jean-Paul Gaultier to later use stretch, synthetics and technical fabrics in their couture collections.
Rabanne’s fascination was with development particularly in space, flight, time travel and astrology. He claimed to have lived several previous lives, and to have predicted many extraterrestrial events. His pronouncement’s and fashion adventures in construction technique and of course, the so called “chain mail” dress were memorable. He pioneered belief in the extraordinary.
