PARIS (AP) – Paco Rabanne, the Spanish-born designer known for perfumes that sold around the world but who made a name for himself with metallic space-age fashions that gave catwalks a new edge, has died. The group that owns its own fashion. the house was announced. Friday.
“Maison Paco Rabanne wishes to honor our visionary designer and founder, who died today at the age of 88. As one of the most important fashion figures of the 20th century, her legacy will live on,” beauty and fashion company Puig said in a statement. .
Le Telegramme newspaper quoted the mayor of Vannes, David Robo, as saying that Rabanne died at his home in the town of Portsall in the Brittany region.
Fashion house Rabanne presents its collections in Paris and plans to unveil the brand’s latest ready-to-wear designs during the upcoming fashion week, from February 27 to March 3.
Rabanne was known as a rebel designer in a career that blossomed with his partnership with the Puig family, a Spanish firm that now owns other design houses including Nina Ricci, Jean Paul Gaultier, Carolina Herrera and Dries Van Noten. The company also owns the perfume brands Byredo and Penhaligon.
“Paco Rabanne made the magnetic transgression. Who else could get Parisian fashionistas (to) ask for plastic and metal dresses? Who but Paco Rabanne could imagine a perfume called Calandre – the word means ‘car grill’, you know – and turn it into an icon of modern femininity?” said the group’s statement.
Calandre perfume was launched in 1969, the first Puig product in Spain, France and the United States, according to the company.
Born Francisco Rabaneda y Cuervo in 1934, the future designer fled the Spanish Basque Country at the age of 5 during the Spanish Civil War and took the name Paco Rabanne.
She studied architecture at the Beaux Arts Academie in Paris before switching to couture, following in the footsteps of her mother, a couturier from Spain. She said she was once in jail for dressing “scandalously”.
Rabanne sold accessories to well-known designers before launching his own collection.
He titled the first collection presented under his own name “12 unwearable dresses from contemporary materials”. His innovative clothing was made from various types of metal, including his famous use of mail, the chain-like material associated with medieval knights.
Coco Chanel called Rabanne “the metallurgist of fashion”.
French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, saluted “an extraordinary artist who blew the wind of renewal into the world of haute couture,” his office said.
Paco Rabanne was among the first designers to put black mannequins on the catwalk, and in 1983 he opened Center 57, dedicated to the black diaspora from Africa and the Caribbean. Artists, musicians, filmmakers and hip-hop dancers have been frequenting the center for several years, Macron’s office said in a statement.
“My colleagues tell me that I am not a couturier, 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 the interview given at the age of 43 and now preserved at France’s National Audiovisual Institute, Rabanne explained his radical fashion philosophy, revealing a dark side to his complex character.
“I think fashion is prophetic. Fashion heralds the future,” she said at the time, adding that “the future is catastrophic for me.”
Sure enough, the designer predicted a major catastrophe on August 11, 1999, claiming that the Russian space station MIR would fall on France. Instead, a crowd popped champagne at his Left Bank headquarters for a “survivor party.”
Paco Rabanne retired in 2000, and the house did not stage a show for five years, from 2006 until the spring-summer 2012 show.
But the creator also said that women are harbingers of things to come.
The president of the Association of Fashion Designers of Spain, Modesto Lomba, said that Rabanne “left an absolute mark over time. Let’s not forget that he was Spanish and that he triumphed inside and outside of Spain.”
Associated Press writer Angela Charlton contributed to this report.
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