Death of Paco Rabanne, quicksilver fashion designer – Liberation

By designing his metal dresses in the 1960s, the Spanish-born designer made a thunderous entry into the world of fashion, embodying a modernism that stuck with the times. After having declined his celebrity in perfumes, he will lose himself in mystical rantings which will maintain his myth. He died at his home in Brittany at the age of 88.

He has more than passed the milestone of the year 2000 that he dreaded so much. Paco Rabanne finally waited more than twenty years after the passage to the new millennium to give up the ghost, he who announced to have had several lives and to be almost 75,000 years old. The couturier died on Friday February 3, he was 88 years old. In addition to his mystical wanderings (he predicted the destruction of Paris on August 11, 1999), the couturier has long embodied another idea of ​​fashion than that which only wants to dress the crowds or set the trend. We quickly forget the magnitude of what he created to distort the quiet course of clothing creation. Right from the start, Paco Rabanne disrupted the fashion chessboard by deliberately cornering himself.

Born Francisco Rabaneda y Cuervo in 1934 in San Sebastián, in the Spanish Basque Country, he spent the first years of his life in the fishing port of Pasajés before fleeing the civil war. His childhood begins with a tragedy with the death of his father, a member of the Republican forces, shot by Franco’s troops. After a passage through internment camps, the family joined another coast, Breton this one, and settled in Ploujean. Paco Rabanne has retained a deep attachment to Finistère (“I am Breton”he said one day) which made him return to these lands when retirement came.

At the beginning of the 1950s, he moved to Paris full of ambition. “Like Rastignac, I thought to myself Paris.” He begins studies