Paco Rabanne, celebrated fashion designer and perfumer, dead at 88

Paco Rabanne, the Spanish-born pace-setting designer known for his world-selling perfumes and metallic, space fashion, has died, the group that owns the fashion house announced on its website on Friday.

“The house of Paco Rabanne wishes to honor its visionary designer and founder who died today at the age of 88. Among the most seminal fashion figures of the 20th century, his legacy will live on,” said Puig.

Le Telegramme newspaper in Brittany quoted the mayor of Vannes, David Robo, as saying that Rabanne died at his home in Portsall, in the Finistere region.

Rabanne fashion house shows its collection in Paris, and is scheduled to reveal the latest ready-to-wear designs of the brand in the fashion week from February 27 to March 3.

He is known as a rebel designer in a career that blossomed in collaboration with Antonio and Mariano Puig, a Spanish company that now also owns other design houses, including Nina Ricci and Jean Paul Gaultier.

“Paco Rabanne created the magnetism of transgression. 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 ‘car grill,’ you know — and become the epitome of modern femininity?” the statement said.

‘Metallurgist fashion’

Calandre perfume was launched in 1969, the first product by Puig in Spain, France and the United States, according to the group.

Born Francisco Rabaneda y Cuervo in 1934, he fled Spain’s Basque country at the age of five during the Spanish Civil War, and took the name Paco Rabanne.

He studied architecture at Paris’ Beaux Arts Academie before moving to couture – in the footsteps of his mother, who was a couturier in Spain – where, he once said, he was arrested at one point for being dressed in “scandalous” fashion.

He began his career sketching handbags and high-end shoes, before branching out into fashion, designing clothing and jewelry with nonconventional materials such as metal and plastic. His first fashion house opened in the mid-1960s.

In the first collection under his name, he introduced “12 unwearables with contemporary materials.” Innovative clothing made of various types of metal, including the famous use of mail, best associated with medieval knights.

Coco Chanel reportedly called Rabanne “the metallurgist of fashion.”

“My friends tell me I’m not a couturier, but an artist and it’s true that I’m a craftsman. … I work with my hands,” he said in an interview in the 1970s.

In an interview given at the age of 43 and now held at the French National Audiovisual Institute, Rabanne explained his radical fashion philosophy.

“I am prophetic fashion. Fashion announces the future,” he said, adding that women are harbingers of what lies on the horizon.

“When the hair balloons, the regime falls,” Rabanne said. “If the hair is soft, everything is fine.”