Paco Rabanne

Rabanne was born 18 February 1934 in the Basque town of Pasajes, Gipuzkoa province. His father, a Republican Colonel, was executed by Francoist troops during the Spanish Civil War. Rabanne's mother was chief seamstress at Cristóbal Balenciaga's first couture house in Donostia, Basque Country, and moved Rabanne's family when he opened Balenciaga in Paris in 1937, due to the Spanish Civil War. In mid-1950s Paris, while studying architecture at l'École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Rabanne earned money making fashion sketches for Dior and Givenchy, and shoe sketches for Charles Jourdan, nevertheless he subsequently took a job with France's foremost developer of reinforced concrete, Auguste Perret, working there for over ten years.

He started his career in fashion by creating jewelry for Givenchy, Dior, and Balenciaga and founded his own fashion house in 1966. He used unconventional material such as metal, paper, and plastic for his metal couture and outlandish and flamboyant designs. For the debut of his namesake brand in 1966, he presented "Manifesto: 12 unwearable dresses in contemporary materials".

Rabanne is known for the green costume worn by Jane Fonda in the 1968 science-fiction film Barbarella. Françoise Hardy was a big fan of Rabanne's designs. For Tour 1996 and the resulting Live à Bercy, singer Mylène Farmer had Rabanne do her live-concert stage costumes.

In 1968, he began collaborating with fragrance company Puig, which resulted in the company marketing Rabanne's perfumes. In 1976, the company built a perfume factory in Chartres, France. In the 1980s, in Brazil, his men's perfume brand registration was forfeited due to a court judgement that the brand was never officially present in Brazil despite heavy advertising and a strong local awareness. The court reasoned that because the Puig's local distributor was smuggling perfume into Brazil, the company could not show proof of payment of import duties. It took six or seven years to recover his brand name in Brazil.

Paco Rabanne is famous for his eccentric statements on television. He claims he has lived several lives (including that of a prostitute in the time of Louis XV), to have known Jesus in a previous life, to have seen God three times, to have been visited by extraterrestrials, to have murdered Tutankhamun,[14] and to be 75,000 years old.[15]

In 1999, he announced that, at the age of seventeen, he had had visions of Parisians in flames throwing themselves into the Seine and that after studying other concordant prophecies, he came to the conclusion that the Mir space station was going to crash in France at the time of the solar eclipse of August 11, 1999, its debris causing thousands of deaths in Paris and in the Gers region. On 10 May 1999, he publicly undertakes not to make any more predictions if Mir does not crash into Paris on 11 August 1999. However, he claims to have had an apparition of the Virgin Mary telling him to continue the predictions. ...

Source: Article "Paco Rabanne" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.