He was born on February 18, 1934 under the sky of Pasaia, a small town on the Spanish Basque coast.
He died this Friday in Portsall, Brittany, at the age of 88, leaving a creative legacy often described as extravagant, visionary, or even avant-garde.
Coco Chanel said of him that he was a “metallurgist”.
Others called him the futurist, the mystic, the architect, the prophet, the astrologer.
The man was reacting, and not just by his appearance as a monk or as an unconventional tailor who had made welding devices and pliers, his own threads and needles used to design his metal dresses.
He believed in reincarnation, numerology and theories of Nostradamus, and had alternately announced the crash of the MIR space station in Paris or the
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Fashion designer Paco Rabanne at home in 1981. Getty Images
A garment architect
In addition to the spiritual man who claimed to receive messages from the universe, Paco Rabanne embodied a free and experimental fashion imagined from totally new materials, which influenced a whole generation of couturiers such as Martin Margiela, Alexander McQueen or Nicolas Ghesquière, seduced by its avant-garde approach and its bold use of metal and plastic.
Paco Rabanne did not think that clothing had to be designed with fabric.
We owe him in particular the first chainmail dresses or those in aluminum plate, the first models of which weighed several kilos.
This did not prevent them from being worn by the stars in vogue in the 1960s – Françoise Hardy, Jane Birkin and Brigitte Bardot, among others.
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His attraction to clothing came about by chance, when he was financing his architecture studies at the Beaux-Arts, by drawing fashion sketches.
At 17, Paco Rabanne moved to Paris after growing up in Morlaix, Brittany.
He was 5 years old when his family moved there, fleeing the Spanish Civil War after the assassination of his father in 1936, shot by the Francoists.
On the sidelines of his sketches published in the press, he tries his hand at creating rhodoïd accessories (earrings and glasses), then immediately launches his fashion brand, in his own name.
Her armored dresses created for liberated women catch the eye, they are written with an architectural approach that will make her DNA.
In 1999, Paco Rabanne gradually retired from fashion, before hanging up for good in 2009,
year of its last ready-to-wear fashion show.
Today, the brand is continuing its journey with Julien Dossena at the helm.