Paco Rabanne died this Friday, February 3, 2022 in Portsall, Brittany. The 88-year-old fashion designer was also known for his eccentric predictions.
[Updated Feb. 3, 11:03 p.m.] Paco Rabanne is dead. The news fell this Friday, February 3, 2023. It was Le Télégramme which first announced the death of Francisco Rabaneda y Cuervo, his real name. Paco Rabanne died at the age of 88 in Finistère. For several years now, he had retired far from the spotlight and red carpets and led a peaceful life in the small town of Portsall, where he had put his suitcases in 2002. The fact remains that the Franco-Spanish , who had arrived in France to escape the civil war that was raging on the other side of the Pyrenees, marked the history of fashion forever. Nicknamed the “metallurgist” of fashion, because of the original materials of his creations, which sometimes lacked thread and fabric, according to his detractors, Paco Rabanne will forever remain a fashion icon.
Among her favorite models, Kathy Jean-Louis reacted to the death of Paco Rabanne, this Friday, February 3, through her friend, journalist Christine Kelly. “I was very lucky to have been his muse. It was exciting. Twenty years! A daring and extraordinary artist. A simple and humble man”, she confided, while Maison Paco Rabanne paid tribute to its “visionary creator and founder”. “Among the most influential fashion figures of the 20th century, his legacy will remain a constant source of inspiration. We are grateful to Monsieur Rabanne for establishing our avant-garde legacy and defining a future of limitless possibilities.” But if Paco Rabane leaves behind him many perfumes and clothing creations, this great couturier will also have marked the spirits by his personality as well as… by his many wacky predictions.
The best known of his predictions remains that of the fall of the Mir space station over Paris. On May 10, 1999, Paco Rabanne was a guest on the program On s’entretien de vous, broadcast on France 3. On this occasion, the couturier came to talk about a prophecy he would have seen, setting Paris on fire, and that he tells in the book 1999: the fire of the sky. The man then predicted the fall of the Mir station (space station of the Soviet Union) on the capital on the day of the total eclipse scheduled for August 11 of the same year. In an archive published on the INA website, Paco Rabanne explains:
“When I was 17, I had flashes, when I arrived in Paris, of people burning alive, screaming and I saw these people throwing themselves into the Seine. I started to study all the prophecies. All the prophecies said that one day the capital of Gaul would burn. But by what fire? Two years ago, I had incredible flashes and thought that a comet, something fiery, was coming upon Paris, falling from the sky. I realized while speaking with a CNRS researcher that nothing fell from the sky, except perhaps, he told me, Mir. And in Mir, there is plutonium and, perhaps, an atomic battery or worse. And it is this worst that I have seen because all the prophecies speak of it. I even found in Nostradamus the name of Mir. The prophecies of other seers who announce these destructions of Paris during the darkness of a day. It is the eclipse which is announced.”
The fall, announced for August 11 therefore, obviously does not occur. Before that date, Paco Rabanne said he would be silent “forever” if nothing happened, adding: “Never again will I speak of prophecies or this theme, anywhere.” As Sud-Ouest reports, Paco Rabanne had however made his mea culpa in the columns of the regional daily the following day. Visibly not very proud, he had confessed his mistake. Paco Rabanne had also confided “to feel a great shame” and “to deserve all the ‘din'” caused by his apocalyptic declarations.
Also in 1999, Paco Rabanne stood out for other of his statements. In a new book, Trajectory. From one life to another, he sometimes presented himself as High Priest in Thebes, assassin of Tutankhamun, but also as a prostitute at the court of Louis XV – “I served fresh flesh”, he had declared. on the set of Thierry Ardisson-, or as living on Earth for 78,000 years and having met extraterrestrials. So many crazy statements that have led him to withdraw from public life and to be more discreet since the beginning of the 21st century, quietly settled in Brittany.
Francisco Rabaneda y Cuervo was born on February 18, 1934 in Pasajes, Spain, in the Basque Country region. With his mother, they fled the civil war in Spain and settled in France, in Brittany. His father, a colonel in the Spanish republican forces, did not accompany them and was killed by Franco’s troops. It was in Morlaix that Paco Rabanne grew up, before heading to Paris to study at the National School of Fine Arts. After graduating, he began making accessories for haute couture clothing, before presenting his first collection in 1966, which was out of place, made up of Rhodoïd and metal.
Over the years, he forged a solid reputation in the capital and never stopped designing clothes, including some for Françoise Hardy. Follower of experiments with new materials (paper, metal in particular), he splits by the lack of use of the thread and the needle, as his detractors said. Paco Rabanne reached the peak of his career in 1990 when he received the Dé d’or, a title awarded for the best haute couture collection. Beyond clothing, it is in perfumery that he also made a name for himself, developing perfumes from the 1970s and which were part of his success. At the same time, he launched a magazine, opened a production house, a place for recording, rehearsals and production, and ran a club. His personality is also remembered for his many, often wacky predictions.
If Paco Rabanne was nicknamed the metallurgist of fashion, there is another point on which he stood out: even before Yves Saint Laurent, it was he who, in 1964, evoked in August 2021 VanityFair, dresses a black model , putting black identity in the spotlight on the haute couture catwalks. Among his favorite models, we find Donyale Luna, who was the first black model in history, reports Madame Figaro, Katoucha known as the Fulani princess, Kathy Jean-Louis, Nelly Kéïta or even the princess of Burundi Esther Kamatari. A taste for black culture and identity that has long earned him some animosities. “Rabanne is still banned from appearing in the American fashion press because he shows his creations on black models”, wrote journalist Gérard Lefort in 1998, in the columns of Liberation.
Co-creator of the Black Sugar club, where the Afro-Caribbean youth of Paris thronged for a time, he also set up, in 1983, an art and work center accessible free of charge in the vicinity of Stalingrad. Center 57. Objective: to welcome artists from the black Parisian diaspora, whether musicians or dancers, as well as street groups formed by young people from the neighborhoods. The center finally closed in 1985, after complaints from the neighborhood. But Paco Rabanne did not stop there, notably creating his own record company, with which he again accompanied many black artists.
