If his name was synonymous with blockbusters in perfumery or predictions as catastrophic as eccentric, his daring choices of materials, his avant-garde vision and his creative freedom influenced a whole generation of designers. He died at the age of 88.
by Vicky Chahine
It was a visionary, in several respects. Paco Rabanne died in Portsall (Finistère), revealed Friday, February 3 The telegram , Information of which MO12345LEMONDE obtained confirmation. He leaves behind a singular imprint in the history of fashion. At the turn of the twentieth e century, his name was above all synonymous with blockbusters in perfumery or predictions as catastrophic as eccentric. Yet his daring choices of materials, his way of working them, his avant-garde vision and his creative freedom influenced a whole generation of couturiers.
Born February 18, 1934 in Pasaia, in the province of Guipuscoa in the Spanish Basque Country, Francisco Rabaneda y Cuervo – his real name – is bathed very early in the seam thanks to his mother, who works for Cristobal Balenciaga. After the death of her husband, colonel of King Alphonse XIII shot by the Franquis, the latter flees Spain with her four children. They cross the Pyrenees on foot and arrived in France, they take refuge in Brittany, near Morlaix. Paco Rabanne grows, imbued with both the pragmatism of his mother, a committed socialist, and the shamanism of his grandmother, also a fervent Catholic.
At the age of 17, the young man moved to Paris where he studied architecture for the National School of Fine Arts for ten years, notably with the specialist in reinforced concrete Auguste Perret. “A major and difficult art that requires absolute rigor,” he told L’Express in 2008. This rigor, he also puts it at the service of the drawings he carries out, in parallel with his studies, for large Sewing houses (Dior, Givenchy, Balenciaga…).
“in the minds of the Dadaists”
“Quickly, I noticed that Parisian designers were complaced in an attitude far too backward -looking for my taste. (…) The world was changing and fashion was bogged down in a dismaying immobility. (…) It is As well as germinated in my mind the project of presenting my own collection of haute couture, in the spirit of the Dadaists, that is to say in a gesture of provocation and revolt, in the hope of shaking this inertia a little And to promote, perhaps, greater modernity, “he wrote in trajectory. From one life to another, his bestseller published in 1991 with Michel Lafon. Finally, he will not draw buildings but clothes, but without departing from an architectural approach that will never leave him.
His enthronement as a fashion designer took place in 1964 with the presentation on barefoot models of “twelve experimental dresses in contemporary materials”, followed, in 1966, of “twelve importable dresses”, designed as a manifesto. Seeing the collection in rhodoid and metal parade in a room from the George-V hotel on a stone soundtrack, Gabrielle Chanel treats Paco Rabanne from “Metallurgist”. In fact, to work on her silhouettes of jeanne of futuristic arc and assemble her squares of mirrors who play with the shadow and the light, the designer uses more often the pliers and the torch than the thread and the needle.
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