Tinsmith of heavy fashion

Paco Rabanne, the great 20th-century designer, architect, tailor, mystic, Spaniard and Frenchman, died in his home in Portsala, a coastal town in the French Finisterre. On February 18, he could have celebrated his 89th birthday. World fashion owes him a new style, new materials and a new concept of femininity.

In recent years, his brand has worked for Paco Rabanne. In the 1990s, he sold the rights and name to the Catalan group Puig, and he finally immersed himself in the really important pursuits. From Paco Rabanne, he seemed to be once again born in the Spanish Basque Country Francisco Rabaneda y Cuervo. Once upon a time, a grandmother, a zealous Catholic, who at the same time believed in the transmigration of souls, explained to him that her earthly path, Francisco, began at the court of the Egyptian pharaohs. Now, when it was possible not to deal with collections, he communicated with spirits and saw the future. Once, because of him, Paris almost became depopulated. The grey-bearded soothsayer promised that the de-orbited Soviet space station Mir would fall on the city. It worked out. Since then, they rather laughed at him, calling all sorts of fantastic theories and predictions “Pakorabanism”.

In fact, he predicted the future very correctly, even at the age of 32, when he presented his sensational Manifesto in the hall of the George V Hotel in Paris, which he called “12 unwearable dresses made of modern materials.” He brought a dozen girls to the journalists, dressed up in the likeness of chain mail made of aluminum, cardboard or then fashionable plastic rhodoid based on acetylcellulose. These girls wore outfits, consider, on their naked bodies and walked not in solemn silence, like other important fashion designers, but almost for the first time to the music. For those who did not want to listen to Pierre Boulez’s Hammer Without a Master accompanying the show, the costume designer said: “If you don’t like this music, you won’t like my fashion, you better leave.”

Fashion columnists were baffled. It was obviously not fashion, such as it used to be seen. But it was clearly an art useful to fashion, expanding its power, a completely different image of femininity, preparing Roger Vadim’s cinematic “Barbarella”, a warrior girl, an astronaut girl. They wrote about the show: “Metal for fashion, a Parisian couturier who brings the art of armor back to life”, which infuriated Gabrielle Chanel, who called the newcomer a “metallurgist”, more precisely, a “tinsmith”. She did not forgive the mockery of the sequins and sequins of traditional haute couture through the ringing sparkling plates.

Paco Rabanne did not expect at all, as other couturiers did, orders for the models they liked, secular fittings, fees. He clearly said: “High fashion should be unwearable. She’s a dream manifesto.” Who needs a stack of tin cans tied with wire?

It was indeed a manifesto, which in the USSR was appreciated and remembered by the film “Adventurers” (1967), where the heroine of Joanna Shimkus, the artist Letizia, who became for us the female alter ego of Rabanne, wore chain mail. It is then that he will come with shows both to Moscow and Kyiv, where there is adventure. By the way, he first visited Moscow back in the 1950s with his mother, a staunch communist. He was one of the “children of Spain” after all. The boy, the son of a military man who died during the Spanish Civil War, was taken by his mother to neighboring France. Literally taken away. She, her old mother and four children walked the secret immigrant trail through the Pyrenees. Since then, Francisco has lived in France, choosing though the same ocean, but the other coast, Brittany.

He studied architecture at Beaus-Arts in Paris, and one of his professors was Auguste Perret, famous for his concrete structures. It seems to me that despite his practice in fashion houses, the young Spaniard, who had not yet identified himself as Paco Rabanne, learned not to sew dresses, but to build them. His way of typing outfits from pixels became a fashion itself, the unbearable began to be worn. And although the weight of his dress could reach 10 kilograms, women who decided on such a test recall that the truly architectural design of structures, the correct ratio of facades and interiors, advanced ventilation made his outfits by no means as painful for the body as it might seem in the photographs.

Over time, his radicalism softened, he also achieved commercial success, after haute couture he launched into pret-a-porter, launching a line of accessories, perfumes, and cosmetics. Colleagues have long recognized him, awarding him the highest badge of honor for a couturier, the Golden Thimble, which, however, was too common a badge for such a madman. We have not seen his collections for a long time and have not heard his predictions, even in a covid era grateful for mysticism. He did not recall how things were with him at the court of Charlemagne or during the flood of Atlantis, of which he was a witness. True, he knew that his journey was over, his grandmother had warned him long ago that Francisco Rabaneda y Cuervo was going through his last earthly incarnation.

Alexey Tarkhanov