PARIS — Paco Rabanne, the Spanish-born designer known for his world-selling perfumes and his metallic space-age fashions, has died, the group that owns his fashion house announced on its website Friday.
“The House of Paco Rabanne wishes to honor our visionary designer and founder, who died today at the age of 88. His legacy will live on among the most significant fashion figures of the 20th century,” the Puig beauty and fashion company said in a statement. .
Le Telegramme newspaper quoted Mayor Van David Robaud as saying that Raban died at his home in the town of Portsalle in the Brittany region.
The Rabanne fashion house is showing its collections in Paris and plans 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 rebel designer in a career that flourished thanks to his collaboration with the family-owned Spanish company Puig, which 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.
“Paco Raban made the transgression magnetic. Who else could make fashionable Parisians demand dresses made of plastic and metal? Who but Paco Rabanne could imagine a fragrance called Calandre — the word means “car grill,” you know — and turn it into an icon of modern femininity?” the group said in a statement.
According to the company, Calandre perfume was released in 1969 and became the first Puig product in Spain, France and the United States.
Born Francisco Rabaneda y Cuervo in 1934, the future designer fled Spain’s Basque Country at the age of 5 during the Spanish Civil War and adopted the name Paco Raban.
The fashion designer pays homage to his Mexican roots through his fashion brand
He studied architecture at the Paris Academy of Fine Arts before moving into couture, following in the footsteps of his mother, who was a couturier in Spain. He said she was once jailed for dressing “scandalously”.
Before launching his own collection, he sold accessories to famous designers.
He called the first collection presented under his own name “12 unsuitable dresses in modern materials”. His innovative outfits were made from various types of metal, including his famous use of mail, a chain-like material associated with medieval knights.
Coco Chanel reportedly called Rabanne “the metallurgist of fashion.”
“My colleagues tell me that I am not a couturier, but an artisan, and it is true that I am an artisan… I work with my hands,” he said in an interview in the 1970s.
In an interview Rabanne gave when he was 43 years old and now on display at France’s National Audiovisual Institute, he explained his radical fashion philosophy:
“I think fashion is prophetic. Fashion heralds the future,” he said, adding that women are harbingers of what lies ahead.
“When hair swells, regimes fall,” said Raban. “If the hair is smooth, everything is fine.”
Copyright © 2023, The Associated Press. All rights reserved.