Maverick designer Paco Rabanne dead at 88

Few designers were so adamant in their refusal to conform to fashion industry expectations, but Rabanne understood that was key to his success.

Spanish-born fashion designer Paco Rabanne poses with Ukrainian designer Veronika Jeanvie in Kiev. .

Paco Rabanne, fashion designer, was born on February 18, 1934. He died on February 3, 2023, aged 88

If Paco Rabanne was hard to define as the “enfant terrible” of Paris fashion who went on to create the world’s bestselling aftershave, his multifarious philosophical pronouncements did not add clarity.

The self-taught designer had shot to international fame in the 1960s by helping to craft jewellery for Dior, Givenchy and Balenciaga before founding his own fashion house in 1966. He then brought a space-age futurism to the fusty classicism of Paris’s haute couture scene, shocking the city’s fashion establishment with geometric dresses fabricated from wood, plastic, metal and paper and by being the first to feature black models on the Paris catwalks.

Rabanne’s subversive futurism was beamed with warp speed to an international audience through the cult success of the 1968 intergalactic comic-strip movie Barbarella, in which his penchant for sexy, figure-hugging outfits using innovative materials was exemplified by the see-through moulded plastic breastplate worn by Jane Fonda in the title role.

Parisian traditionalists called him a fraud. Coco Chanel declared: “He is not a tailor, but a metallurgist.” However, Audrey Hepburn, Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin were among the glamorous patrons who gave his creations credibility by wearing them. Salvador Dali deigned to say that he was “the second genius of Spain”, after Dali himself.

Actor Georgina Robertson with designer Paco Rabanne backstage at a Paris show.

Naomi Campbell in a Paco Rabanne photo shoot.

Rabanne could certainly rival Dali in the surreality of some of his public statements. He claimed to have been on an “astral journey” as a seven-year-old, saying later that he saw architectural shapes and clothes on this journey.

These, it later transpired, were visual memories from one of Rabanne’s past lives. According to him, he had been an ancient Egyptian priest responsible for the murder of Tutankhamun; he had also been a flying saucer pilot, a torturer during the Spanish Inquisition and an 18th-century Parisian courtesan. Visitors to his spartan studio would be subject to an inspection of their hands, after which Rabanne would tell them who they had been in their past lives.

The French press branded him “Waco Paco”, but huge profits accrued after the launch of Paco Rabanne Pour Homme in 1973, which would become the world’s bestselling men’s fragrance for more than a decade.

Francisco Rabaneda Cuervo was born in 1934 near San Sebastian in northern Spain. His father was a Republican colonel who fought against Franco’s troops in the Spanish civil war, but was captured and executed.

At the age of three Paco, with his elder brother, two sisters, mother and grandmother were stationed at a refugee camp in Guernica when it was attacked by German bomber aircraft that obliterated the small town.

He recalled lying awake with a pencil in his mouth because he thought that would stop his ribcage from exploding. Having survived the attack, the family fled over the Pyrenees into France. His mother, who had been the chief seamstress at Cristobal Balenciaga’s couture house in San Sebastian, found work at his Paris fashion house.

After a childhood spent in Brittany, Rabanne began ten years of studying architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1951. Despite a lack of formal training, he funded his course and lifestyle by designing abstract jewellery and fancy buttons made from plaited leather, precious stones and even the humble coffee bean, for designers including Balenciaga and Givenchy.

A Rabanne design from 1968.

Paco Rabanne’s One Million fragrance.

By the early 1960s he was mixing in fashionable Parisian circles that included the models and avant-garde designers Christiane Bailly and Emmanuelle Khanh. Rabanne’s “girls”, as he referred to them, were only too happy to wear his increasingly eccentric pieces, including eyeshades mounted on a headband and rhodoid earrings.

Swapping a needle and thread for a pair of pliers, he then developed his riveting technique for clothing. His first dresses in metal and plastic were made of small cubes of material linked together like chain-mail and decorated with pearls and sequins.

In 1965 he opened a studio at 29 rue du Caire and a year later he showed his first full collection.

Not one to mislead his audience, Rabanne called his opening show “12 unwearable dresses in contemporary materials”, setting down his design manifesto as well as his commitment to innovation over commercialism. One of the outfits included a metal skirt that weighed 32kg (71lb) and some of the dresses that were later worn by Bardot and Elizabeth Taylor.

Set to the modern tones of Pierre Boulez’s Le marteau sans maitre, and with the hair done by Vidal Sassoon, Rabanne shocked the rich dowagers of the traditionally haute couture crowd with almost-naked black models who were barefoot because he did not have enough money for shoes.

A Rabanne designed spiky metal dress in 1999.

In 1966 Rabanne, the pioneer of throwaway fashion, created a disposable dress made of soft, fireproof paper. Drawing on his architectural background, he did away with sewing, preferring to fix the dress together with a specially adapted edger for architects’ plans. Perhaps the pinnacle of instant fashion, each dress took only three minutes to make.

Sold in envelopes, he planned for them to be stocked in vending machines at airports and stations. From here his ideas spread to moulded dresses, knitted fur and aluminium jerseys, and in 1995 Rabanne designed and made a dress from concrete.

Designing the costumes for Fonda in Barbarella may have created a fantasy for a generation of adolescent boys, but Rabanne also averred that using such materials liberated women as warriors, needing to affirm their desire for emancipation.

That year, with the Barcelona-based Puig family, he launched his lucrative fragrances. Rabanne’s first female scent was Calandre, in 1969, but his most successful venture in this field was Paco Rabanne pour Homme. In July 1984 it refreshed the parts that other sellers of scent could not reach when Playboy magazine included an insert of the luxury scent that momentarily distracted its readers.

Three years later the Puig family took over the fashion label, having worked with Rabanne on his lucrative fragrances since 1968.

Rabanne in 1967.

Fashion and fragrance aside, Rab-anne was probably surprised that he lived so long, considering he predicted the end of the world would have ended in 1999. Fancying himself as something of a soothsayer, Rabanne was given to making paranormal claims: he thought that a Third World War would start in 1998 and that the Russian space station Mir would fall on Paris in 1999. He was convinced that the Antichrist would arrive in 2005 and Rabanne repeatedly preached about the golden age of Aquarius, beginning in 2030 and lasting for another 2,000 years.

An intense and softly-spoken man, Rabanne wrote and lectured extensively about his paranormal philosophy. His first book, Trajectoire, published in 1991, told the story of his first astral voyage. Other titles included End of Time and Journey From One Life to Another, both of which told of his own paranormal experiences.

Rabanne, who never married and professed to live “like a monk”, remained a frugal and disciplined man. For most of his life he lived in rented accommodation, gave away a good proportion of his earnings - “I did not need it” - and did not smoke, drink or go to nightclubs.

Rabanne wore simple Maoist suits, never learnt to drive, had few possessions and lived for his work.

Few designers were so adamant in their refusal to conform to fashion industry expectations, but Rabanne understood that was key to his success.

Speaking to students at the La Croix-Rouge high school in Brest in 2010, he told them: “Not everyone can be a star. You have to know how to be smart. The main thing is to talk about yourself, to differentiate yourself from others. Never copy.”

The Times