Paco Rabanne, the decade-spanning virtuoso of industrial couture has died. He was 88 years old. The news was confirmed by Puig, who has been a partner with the designer since the beginning of his career.
“I am deeply saddened by the passing of Mr. Paco Rabanne. The history of Puig and Paco Rabanne began in the late 1960s with the launch of Calandre,” Puig Chairman and CEO Marc Puig said in a statement. “A major personality in fashion, his was a daring, revolutionary, and provocative vision, conveyed through a unique aesthetic. He will remain an important source of inspiration for the Puig fashion and fragrance teams, who continuously work together to express [his] radically modern codes.”
Rabanne came of age as a couturier during the 1960s, creating futuristic clothing of hammered metal, paper, and pliable plastics. A surrealist whose space age designs and apocalyptic theories of the world were unorthodox, Rabanne will be remembered alongside Emanuel Ungaro, Yves Saint Laurent, and André Courrèges as a skilled craftsman who helped modernize haute couture.
Salvador Dalí once boasted: “There are only two geniuses in Spain: me and Paco Rabanne.” This notion of Rabanne’s genius echoed throughout the heady 1960s and 1970s with his mod, Joan of Arc-inspired collections and chain-link minidresses made famous by Jane Birkin, Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda in Barbarella, and the 1967 film Casino Royale. The designer also found powerful allies for his unconventional creations in American tastemakers including Peggy Guggenheim, Diana Vreeland, and Eugenia Sheppard. “It was the Americans who believed in me and ‘created’ me,” Rabanne told The New York Times in 2002.
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