‘I have always had the impression of being a time accelerator,’ he said later, in 2016. While remaining largely out of the public eye in the years since, he was made an Officer of the Legion d’Honneur – one of France’s highest awards – by the country’s culture minister in 2010. ‘I like my fragrances to be fresh first, then structured, full of vibrations and contrasts,’ Rabanne said.Īfter three decades at the helm of his eponymous label, Rabanne retired in 1999. Rabanne said he wanted the metallic scent, with top notes of bergamot and aldehydes, to evoke a couple making love on the bonnet of a car in a forest. His foray into fragrance began in 1969 with debut fragrance Calandre – created alongside nose Michel Hy – which was encased in a metal bottle evocative of a Rolls-Royce radiator grille. Rabanne is also synonymous with fragrance, his name appearing on some of the bestselling perfumes of the last half-decade. ‘It is for this woman that I conceive my designs.’ ‘The woman of the future will be efficacious, seductive, and without contest, superior to men,’ Rabanne once said. A definitive moment in the ‘Space Age’ movement was Rabanne’s costumes for Barbarella in 1968, a sexually charged space-exploration movie set in the 41st century and starring Jane Fonda as the movie’s titular character. Pieces were defined by a futuristic sensibility, featuring sharp, modernist silhouettes, metallic elements and an influence of contemporary engineering and architecture. The look established him, alongside Cardin and Courrèges, as one of a cadre of so-called ‘Space Age’ designers of the 1960s, a movement which coincided with a boom in space exploration, culminating with the moon landing in 1969. (Image credit: Silver Screen Collection via Getty Images) Establishing Rabanne as something of an ‘enfant terrible’ of Parisian fashion, the dresses came to epitomise his distinct vision as a designer, which married historical elements – primarily chain mail, which was to become his signature – with contemporary materials, like plastic, rhodoid and aluminium, and the abbreviated silhouettes of the 1960s. It was 1966 that proved formative in Rabanne’s career, when he released his first haute couture collection under his own name, titled ‘Twelve Unwearable Dresses in Contemporary Materials’. Heading to France, he initially studied architecture at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, before shifting to fashion, creating bold jewellery and accessories for a slew of Parisian fashion houses, including Nina Ricci, Givenchy, Pierre Cardin and André Courrèges. (Image credit: Mirrorpix via Getty Images)īorn Francisco Rabaneda Cuervo in 1934, close to San Sebastián, Spain, Rabanne left the country not long later, after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, with his mother (she had worked as head seamstress for Cristóbal Balenciaga, and the Spanish couturier remained a profound influence throughout Rabanne’s career).
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