Paco Rabanne Dies at 88

Paco Rabanne, the Spanish designer who died on Friday at age 88, was remembered as a fashion maverick whose futuristic vision and use of nonconventional materials left a big mark — that reverberates still.

His death, in Portsall, France, was confirmed by Spanish group Puig, which controls the Paco Rabanne fashion house and fragrance business.

“Fashion continues to lose radical authors, capable of inventing worlds and visions from scratch,” said Giorgio Armani. “With Paco Rabanne, we lose an authentic futurist, an experimenter always projected forward, always open to tomorrow.

“I remember the powerful impression that the costumes he created for Jane Fonda in ‘Barbarella’ by [Roger] Vadim had on me, as much as his unmistakable way to mold unusual materials in wearable shapes did,” he continued. “It’s always sad when a visionary leaves us.”

Valentino Garavani agreed: “He changed it all and surprised us in the late ’70s….Surprise is always a good thing in fashion!”

Bruno Pavlovsky, president of the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, said: “Paco Rabanne was a major fashion designer who never stopped exploring traditional know-how and new techniques with audacity and eccentricity. A couturier who broke new ground in fashion since his first show in Paris.”

Julien Dossena, who has been creative director of the Paco Rabanne fashion house since 2013, paid tribute to the founder’s avant-garde vision.

“Thank you Mr. Rabanne, thank you for having been a couturier who defined a new modernity, who accompanied a cultural revolution. A total artist who, through the expression of his personal utopia, has contributed to changing the vision of the world. Thank you for this legacy,” he said.

Through his design vision, Rabanne anticipated the Millennium as early as 1966 — and was among a clutch of designers in Paris plying Space Age fashions. The others were Pierre Cardin and André Courrèges.

Rabanne’s experiments in dresses and accessories made of metal or Rhodoid plastic discs, introduced in Paris and New York, intrigued and inspired subsequent designers ranging from Jean Paul Gaultier to Miuccia Prada, Thierry Mugler to Yves Saint Laurent.

“Paco Rabanne made transgression magnetic,” said José Manuel Albesa, president of Puig’s fashion and beauty division. “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 ‘automobile grill,’ you know — and turn it into an icon of modern femininity?

“That radical, rebellious spirit set him apart: There is only one Rabanne,” he continued. “With his passing, we are reminded once again of his enormous influence on contemporary fashion, a spirit that lives on in the house that bears his name.”

“I am deeply saddened by the passing of Mr. Paco Rabanne,” said Marc Puig, chairman and chief executive officer of Puig. “The history of Puig and Paco Rabanne began in the late 1960s with the launch of Calandre, the perfume created soon after the designer released ‘12 Unwearable Dresses in Contemporary Materials.’

“A major personality in fashion, his was a daring, revolutionary and provocative vision, conveyed through a unique aesthetic,” Puig added. “He will remain an important source of inspiration for the Puig fashion and fragrance teams, who continuously work together to express Mr. Paco Rabanne’s radically modern codes. I extend my sincere condolences to his family and to those who have known him.”

Rabanne was born on Feb. 18, 1934, as Francisco Rabaneda y Cuervo in the Spanish Basque town of Pasaïa. His mother was a head seamstress at Balenciaga, and his father was in the Spanish Republican army.

“The young Francisco Rabaneda y Cuervo understood the importance of clothing very early on,” said France’s Elysée Palace in a statement. “Very early on, too, he was confronted with mourning and exile.”

Rabanne was barely 5 years old when his father was shot by the Francoists, causing his family to flee. They crossed the Pyrenees by foot to reach Brittany, in Morlaix, a region in France for which he developed a deep attachment.

But his education took him to the French capital. He studied for a decade at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, first focusing on architecture before sketching clothes and sculpting fabrics.

There “he met the specialist in reinforced concrete, Auguste Perret. He kept an architectural conception of the silhouette, as well as a taste for unusual materials,” said the Elysée.

Antonio and Mariano Puig, members of the second generation of the Puig founding family, first visited Rabanne’s offices in Paris near the Folies Bergère and signed the designer on for fragrances in 1968.

Rabanne’s career in the fashion world was atypical. While he dubbed his fashion and fragrance empire “the house of Rabanne,” his dynasty never institutionalized itself in the manner of Saint Laurent or Christian Dior. Instead, he remained a twilight presence, with one foot in the present and one in the past.

He emerged in contemporary pop culture from time to time. His chain-mail dresses were reappropriated in 1999 by Donatella Versace, and his men’s cologne was plugged on “The Sopranos,” for instance. Yet the designer always battled a persistent assumption that he was no longer alive.

In a WWD article dated Feb. 21, 2001, he was quoted as saying from his futuristic headquarters on Île de la Jatte, an island on the outskirts of Paris: “Many people believe I’m dead.”

Part icon, part ghost, he haunted and resisted the current-day fashion world.

Rabanne first appeared on the fashion radar screen in the 1960s, a decade that mirrored his rebellious temperament. The advent of youthful styles in fashion, the Mod revolution, rock music and the spirit of experimentation emboldened a youthful Rabanne.

In the 2001 article, he said: “I wanted to place clothing in harmony with the times. So I decided to present a violent collection-manifesto to show them all what fashion could be.”

His first collection, “12 Unwearable Dresses,” premiered on Feb. 1, 1966. Barefoot models wearing Rhodoid plastic cut into strips and held together by metal rings strutted down the runway of the Hôtel George V to the strains of Pierre Boulez. Paris was outraged. Le Nouvel Observateur accused him of “plastic bombing” the fashion world.

The insurrection continued a month later as Rabanne brought the collection to New York, where amazed spectators reacted with generally more enthusiasm.

He sustained a state of provocation through off-the-cuff quotes he fed to an avid press.

“Haute couture is nothing but a decomposing cadaver surrounded by vultures: publishers, journalists, columnists and advertising people,” he declared in 1967. “They cannot bring themselves to face the fact that fashion is dead, which is why they spend their time trying so hard to make the corpse look alive and well.”

Rabanne soon became the darling of the American fashion press. More innovations followed: chain-mail “dresses” in hammered or studded aluminum; paper wedding gowns; coats composed of metal triangles; a “jewel dress” build from nine kilos of pure gold, modeled by French singer Françoise Hardy at the international diamond fair in 1968; elastic-band clothes made from fringed rubber, and a white mink and steel disc bolero.

Rabanne was also among the first fashion designers to hire Black models.

If Rudi Gernreich represented the visionary endpoint of the American fashion scene, Rabanne was the European designer who most completely embodied the zeitgeist of the ’60s, combing — and counteracting — a sci-fi futurist aesthetic with medieval workmanship.

“We were madly in love with our era, our history, and wanted to impose our ideas and our designers, and we succeeded,” Rabanne recalled in 2001. “The era was crazy, there was a desire for change that was hallucinatory. I’ve never known that again.”

Soon Rabanne was recruited by Hollywood: He outfitted Jane Fonda for the 1968 camp hit “Barbarella” and Audrey Hepburn in the 1966 film “Two for the Road.”

WWD quoted Rabanne as saying: “Givenchy, who I had worked for, told me: ‘You are the only designer I will permit to clothe Audrey.’ But I dressed many others: Madame Newhouse and Peggy Guggenheim, just to name a few.”

Even Hilton Hotels jumped on the Rabanne bandwagon, offering their guests “Pacojamas” — paper pajamas and nightdresses that sold for 15 francs apiece.

Of course, there was the occasional detractor. Coco Chanel said at the time that “Paco Rabanne is not a designer, he’s a metal worker” — a characterization that Rabanne long celebrated.

He sustained the dynamism of his career throughout the 1970s, and branched out into fragrances that then became the financial bedrock of his empire. He introduced Calandre in 1969, in Spain, France and the U.S., breaking ground for Puig’s international development.

Paco Rabanne Pour Homme came out in 1973, paving the way for the brand’s blockbuster men’s scent portfolio. Then the landmark Metal launched in 1979.

But, as with most cultural revolutions launched in the ’60s, by 1980 Rabanne lost his momentum and was forced to surrender the limelight to a new generation of designers.

“Infatuation with my work disappeared the day those wonderful creators Gaultier, Castelbajac, [Claude] Montana and Mugler arrived on the scene,” Rabanne said in 2001.

The designer retired from fashion in 1999, after his last couture show that took place on July 17 of that year, marking his 33rd couture presentation. Then after that, Rabanne was rarely seen in the public eye.

Barcelona-based Puig revived Rabanne’s dormant fashion business in 2011, first with Indian designer Manish Arora. Frenchman Julien Dossena, an alum of the Nicolas Ghesquière era at Balenciaga and a popular figure on the Paris scene, has been leading the fashion house since 2013.

Though Rabanne’s creations were untraditional, he once told WWD, “I’m one of the most classic creators of fashion. Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, Givenchy and Cardin are baroque.” Yet through his use of alternative and industrial materials, Rabanne became viewed as more of a futuristic fashion visionary than a classic creator.

Rabanne’s visions into the future reached beyond fashion.

Once likened in WWD to Nostradamus, for some Rabanne is known less for his fashion and more for his millennial prediction of the Russian space station crashing into Paris.

Heavily involved in astrology and the occult, Rabanne once described himself as “a bit of a medium, a clairvoyant.” In a 1975 interview with various socialites and friends, he announced, “I have always believed in magic, ever since I was eight. I am an Aquarius, that is why I am on the earth, in order to foresee the Third World War.”

While his various Armageddon predictions fell short in hindsight, the mystic influence on his fragrance and fashion did lead to various successes. When launching the gothic women’s Black XS fragrance, which included ingredients from a mythic witches’ brew, Rabanne told the press the recipe was inspired by an altercation with a phantom being. Several months after launching, the scent was ranked eighth in sales for Sephora France and considered a standout performer by most retailers.

Rabanne also accurately foreshadowed the role of the internet in retail and marketing, and was one of the first designers to launch a fragrance online in the mid-1990s. Using the now defunct e-commerce site CyberShop, the Rabanne scent XS Pour Elle made its debut online months before hitting department store shelves — a pioneering move at the time. Rabanne took the promotion a step further and participated himself in a live chat session on the site.

Fast-forward to today, and the Paco Rabanne fragrance business, best known for its male scent franchise, ranked third globally in 2021. It has three masculine pillars — One Million, Invictus and, most recently, Phantom, with a robot-shaped, connected bottle.

In July 2022, Paco Rabanne launched Fame, the women’s fragrance fronted by Elle Fanning, which is meant to channel Hollywood glamour with a Parisian twist and catapult the brand into the women’s fragrance stratosphere. Fame’s bottle is robot-shaped, as well, but dressed in Rabanne’s iconic chain-mail dress and boots echoing those designed by creative director Dossena in real life.

Prior to the 2011 relaunch of Paco Rabanne fashion, Arora remembered meeting a man “quieter than [he] thought [he’d be],” whose unique creativity and personality stood out.

“That’s what set him apart. He lived in his own fantasy and a world only he knew of, and that’s how he created what he did,” said the Paris-based designer, who went on to design two collections for the brand.

Patrick Robinson, who was named artistic director of the brand in 2005 and would serve in that post for three years, said via email: “When I first started at Paco Rabanne, he took me to lunch.  Paco had a wonderful imagination and love of life. He talked about past and  the future lives — yet living so fully in this one.”

Pascal Morand, executive president of the federation, called Rabanne “an emblematic figure of fashion, [who was] passionate about innovation through the use of materials. Paco Rabanne was an emancipator whose creative freedom has deeply marked French and international fashion.”

The Elysée said that France’s President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte Macron, “salute an extraordinary artist, who brought a blast of renewal to the world of haute couture and send their sincere condolences to his family and loved ones.”

French minister of culture Rima Abdul Malak said Rabanne “blew apart the limits of fashion” from his very first collection.

“I salute the iconoclast, the genius designer who dressed Françoise Hardy in gold and diamonds, this ‘fashion metallurgist,’ who branded our imaginations for eternity,” she said.

Palais Galliera director Miren Arzalluz called Rabanne “an irredeemable iconoclast,” who stayed true to his vision up to his retirement. “[His] commitment to questioning established notions on fashion, his experimentation with non-conventional materials and his architectural vision have been at the heart of some of the most iconic creations of the 20th century.”

Carla Sozzani, founder of the namesake foundation and the entrepreneur behind the 10 Corso Como concept store, said: “Over a glass of Sancerre Rouge [wine], Paco told me the most fantastic fantasies of his unique world, where fashion was not fashion, where the world had a meaning of mutation and the future was ahead of us. 

“Armed with new materials — welding torches, aluminum, Rhodoid and metal, instead of needles and thread — he used unwearability as a provocation to make the most desirable wearable clothes,” she continued.   

Sozzani added that Rabanne “wrote me a touching letter, with a clear message for the future: ‘I don’t like to look back, nostalgia is a sweet and sour fruit.’”  

“I am extremely saddened by the news of the death of Paco Rabanne,” said Rosita Missoni. “I met him in Paris in the early 1960s. He was introduced to me by Emmanuelle Khanh, with whom I collaborated in those years, and we immediately took a liking to one another. He created for us visors, earrings and other accessories with plastic materials that were very futuristic for our first show at the Teatro Gerolamo in Milan in June 1966.”