Spanish fashion designer Paco Rabanne has died aged 88 at his home in France. Puig, the parent company of his brands, confirmed the news of the Pasaia native’s death.
The Spanish fashion and fragrance company said he had “marked generations with his radical vision of fashion, and his legacy will live on.” Puig’s fashion president, José Manuel Albesa, said Paco “made transgression magnetic.”
“Who else could induce fashionable Parisian women to clamor for dresses made of plastic and metal,” Albesa said. “That radical, rebellious spirit set him apart: There is only one Rabanne.”
Marc Puig, chairman and chief executive officer of Puig, also paid tribute to the late designer by saying his “daring, revolutionary and provocative vision, conveyed through a unique aesthetic.”
Who was Paco Rabanne
Born as Francisco Rabaneda Cuervo, Rabanne came to the world into a military family from Spain’s Basque region. According to BBC, Paco’s father was a colonel in the Republican military executed in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War.
His mother worked as a seamstress for the designer Cristobal Balenciaga. As a widow, she moved the family to Paris in 1939, where Paco became an architecture student at l‘École Nationale des Beaux-Arts.
Rabanne began drawing fashion sketches and then secured a career designing jewelry for Givenchy, Dior, and Balenciaga.
In 1966, he launched his eponymous fashion house, Paco Rabanne; the rest is history. His controversial designs were also praised for the use of unlikely materials. “I have always had the impression of being a time accelerator,” he said in 2016. “Of going as far as is reasonable for one’s time and not indulging in the morbid pleasure of the known things, which I view as decay.”
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Two years later, in 1968, he signed a deal with the Puig family, who introduced him to the fragrance industry. His debut fragrance, Calandre and Lady Million, are among the favorites.
After a successful career and becoming one of the first fragrance designers to launch his products online in the mid-1990s, in 1999, Rabanne retired from fashion and tried to stay away from the public eye.