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The death occurred in Portsall, a town in French Brittany, where he had a house by the sea.
Photo: Aleixei Boitsot/ Sputnik
The designer Francisco Rabaneda Cuervo, better known in the fashion industry as Paco Rabanne, has died this Friday at the age of 88 at his home by the sea in Portsall, Finisterre (France), reports Le Télégramme.
Born in the Basque Country in 1934, Paco Rabanne had lived in exile in France since he was five years old.
His family decided to flee Spain in the midst of the civil war that left him orphaned by his father, who was shot by national troops for supporting the Second Republic.
While living in the French commune of Brest, he was sought out by the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation and resided there until 1947.
He studied architecture, but devoted himself to haute couture, eventually becoming a great dressmaker, perfumer, and entrepreneur with his own empire.
His love for fashion was inherited from his mother, who had worked in a Balenciaga workshop in San Sebastián.
She debuted her first outfits on the catwalk at the Paris Biennale in 1963, experimenting with different materials and mixing plastic, paper, feathers, and aluminum.
His love of working with metal and wire gave him the nickname 'The Metallurgist of Fashion', which stuck with him for life.
Coco Chanel herself nicknamed him that with a sneer.
In France he studied architecture and fashion design, and early in his career he
designed accessories for Givenchy, Balenciaga and Dior
.
In 1963 she presented the first collection of her suits, in which she already used aluminum, a material that would make his designs recognizable throughout her career.
Rabanne gained worldwide fame in that decade with metallic or plastic outfits, within a totally avant-garde conception of fashion that added to technological advances or the space age.
In 1969
his collaboration began between the designer and the fashion and beauty company Puig
, which eventually acquired the firm in 1986. In 1999 he announced that he was leaving haute couture.
The couturier won the National Fashion Design Award in 2010 for "his innovation and his contribution to all areas of 20th century culture."
His first women's perfume, Calandre, came out in 1969, with intense metallic and floral notes, and in 1973 men's perfumery was revolutionized with the Paco Rabanne Pour Homme aroma.
They say that he was an eccentric in fashion and in real life, Rabanne published several books about his paranormal experiences and defended having had several lives: having met Jesus, Louis XIV, having seen aliens and having assassinated Tutankhamun.
In fact, he claimed that he was actually 75,000 years old.
(Taken from Russia Today and agencies)