Paco Rabanne

Paco Rabanne

Picking up a perfume with an exotic fragrance fills magic around people’s smelling sense, however hardly anyone becomes curious as to who made this appealing scent and what else does he do.

Famously recognized as Paco Rabanne, Franciso Rabaneda Cuervo is a Spanish couture designer who was born on 18th February 1934 to enlighten the fashion world. His fashion career began when he refined his jewelry making skills at Balenciaga, Dior and Givenchy.

Rabanne’s mother was a head of tailoring at a Balenciaga in Spain. When the Spanish Civil War started, he and his mother left for France. There, he studied architecture at Ecole des Beaux Arts and graduated from there in 1964. In 1965, Paco launched his design career by exhibiting a line of twelve contemporary outfits, titled The Unwearables. This is when he introduced his first dress made of plastic.

In 1966, he established his own business and made use of  materials like plastic, paper and metal for his peculiar and gaudy designs. Although his initial education comprised of architecture, he became popular as ‘l’enfant terrible’ during the 1960s in the world of trends and fashion. Many of his designs have a touch of an architect in them and this is what makes his designs stand out.

Rabanne is known for designing costumes for films like Barbarella. His outfits are worn by Mylène Farmer in her live musical concerts. Françoise Hardy was also a huge fan of Rabanne’s works. In addition to this, his designs are worn by Brigette Bardot, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and many more personalities who are attracted to something atypical.

In 1968, he collaborated with Puig to produce Paco Rabanne fragrances known worldwide. The company built a perfume factory in France in 1976. Unfortunately in Brazil, his brand didn’t do well and the registration was cancelled by the court in the 1980s because it was felt that the brand never existed in the country officially even though there was extensive awareness and advertising campaigns spiraling across the streets. The local distributors were smuggling the brand’s perfumes to Brazil and it took Rabanne around seven years to recover its image.

Moving on, Paco Rabanne gave other designers the opportunity to start their career in the field of fashion. David Peck, a designer from Houston worked with Rabanne before the launch of his eponymous line.

Rabanne is a man of multi-dimensional talents, some garner him success while others have made him infamous. Apart from the usual, he has shown a inquisitiveness in paranormal phenomena, in which science loses its authority to justify certain events and experiences. He became quite notorious for falsely predicting the fall of Mir, a Russian space station in 1999 on Paris.

In 2005, for the first time he displayed his drawing in an exhibition in Moscow. The reason for this exhibition was that the designer turned seventy-two years old and his age worried him. He wanted the world to see his hidden skills before his last breath. His drawings were never shown to anyone before, except the artist,  Salvador Dali and that too more than 28 years ago. One of the drawings depicted a scene inspired by the Beslan attack and the designer wanted the proceeds of the sales of his sketches to go to the Beslan women. The event had killed 319 hostages including servicemen and children.