Paco Rabanne facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Paco Rabanne
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Rabanne in Kyiv, 2006
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| Born |
Francisco Rabaneda Cuervo
18 February 1934 |
| Died | 3 February 2023 (aged 88) Ploudalmézeau, Finistère, (Portsall, Brittany)
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| Occupation | Fashion designer |
Francisco Rabaneda Cuervo (18 February 1934 – 3 February 2023), more commonly known under the pseudonym of Paco Rabanne, was a Spanish fashion designer who became known as an enfant terrible of the 1960s French fashion world.
Early life and education
Rabanne was born 18 February 1934 in the Basque town of Pasaia, Gipuzkoa province. His father, a Republican Colonel, was executed by Francoist troops during the Spanish Civil War. Rabanne's mother was chief seamstress at Cristóbal Balenciaga's first couture house in Donostia, Basque Country, and moved Rabanne's family when he opened Balenciaga in Paris in 1937, due to the Spanish Civil War. In mid-1950s Paris, while studying architecture at l'École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Rabanne earned money making fashion sketches for Dior and Givenchy, and shoe sketches for Charles Jourdan, nevertheless he subsequently took a job with France's foremost developer of reinforced concrete, Auguste Perret, working there for over ten years.
Career
Fashion
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He started his career in fashion by creating jewelry for Givenchy, Dior, and Balenciaga and founded his own fashion house in 1966. He used unconventional material such as metal, paper, and plastic for his metal couture and outlandish and flamboyant designs. For the debut of his namesake brand in 1966, he presented "Manifesto: 12 unwearable dresses in contemporary materials".
Rabanne is known for the green costume worn by Jane Fonda in the 1968 science-fiction film Barbarella. Françoise Hardy was a big fan of Rabanne's designs. For Tour 1996 and the resulting Live à Bercy, singer Mylène Farmer had Rabanne do her live-concert stage costumes.
Fragrance
In 1968, he began collaborating with fragrance company Puig, which resulted in the company marketing Rabanne's perfumes. In 1976, the company built a perfume factory in Chartres, France. In the 1980s, in Brazil, his men's perfume brand registration was forfeited due to a court judgement that the brand was never officially present in Brazil despite heavy advertising and a strong local awareness. The court reasoned that because the Puig's local distributor was smuggling perfume into Brazil, the company could not show proof of payment of import duties. It took six or seven years to recover his brand name in Brazil. In 1994, Rabanne first released his scent called XS.
Eccentricities
Paco Rabanne was famous for his eccentric statements on television. He claimed he had lived several lives (including in the time of Louis XV), to have known Jesus in a previous life, to have seen God three times, to have been visited by extraterrestrials, to have murdered Tutankhamun, and to be 75,000 years old.
In 1999, he announced that, at the age of seventeen, he had had visions of Parisians in flames throwing themselves into the Seine and that after studying other concordant prophecies, he came to the conclusion that the Mir space station was going to crash in France at the time of the solar eclipse of August 11, 1999, its debris causing thousands of deaths in Paris and in the Gers region. On 10 May 1999, he publicly undertakes not to make any more predictions if Mir does not crash into Paris on 11 August 1999. However, he claims to have had an apparition of the Virgin Mary telling him to continue the predictions.
Despite the failure of this latest coup, which tarnished his reputation among the public and the media, he continues to appear regularly in a specialized press, dealing more with the subject of his so-called paranormal experiences than that of the high fashion.
Other interests
In 1994, Rabanne wrote the book, Has the Countdown Begun? Through Darkness to Enlightenment.
In 2005, Rabanne opened in Moscow, Russia, the first exhibition of his drawings. His reasoning for showing the drawings then was, "I am 72 years old, and I wanted to present my drawings this year before disappearing from this planet. I have not shown them to anyone except Salvador Dalí 30 years ago, who told me to keep going." Rabanne wanted the money that the drawing sold for to go to the women of Beslan.
In 2006, Rabanne visited Kyiv, Ukraine. He summed up the changes since the Orange Revolution: "Ukraine reminds me of a flower unfolding its petals before my very eyes." In the summer of 2012, Arora was succeeded by the German-Colombian fashion designer Lydia Maurer as chief designer. In mid-2013, Belgian and former Balenciaga designer Julien Dossena was appointed creative director of womenswear at Paco Rabanne. Dossena's designs were subsequently praised by fashion critics. The ateliers are located in Paris above the flagship store of Nina Ricci, another Puig fashion company, on Avenue Montaigne. In January 2016, a new store opened on Paris' Rue Cambon, following the closure of the remaining Paco Rabanne boutiques more than ten years earlier.
A re-edit of his classic "le 69" bag was relaunched by Comme des Garçons.
See also
In Spanish: Paco Rabanne para niños
