The Gipuzkoan designer based in Portsall (France) Paco Rabanne has died at the age of 88, according to the Puig group in a statement this Friday.
Francisco Rabaneda y Cuervo (Pasajes de San Pedro, 1934), who would have turned 89 on February 18, was the son of a Balenciaga seamstress and a Republic general shot by the Francoists.
Since he was a child, he lived in France, where he studied architecture and began working as an accessories designer, where he spent his entire life.
Already from haute couture, he was groundbreaking in his designs, in which he came to include plastic and metallic materials.
In 1989 he was distinguished Knight of the Legion of Honor of France; in 2000 Spain gave him the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts, and in 2010 he received two recognitions: the degree of Official of the Legion, and the National Fashion Design Award in Spain.
In 2010, when the National Award was proclaimed, he declared: “It has been nice to see that both my artistic part and my achievement in the world of fashion have been recognized” and that it continued to be recognized by official institutions and professionals.
THE LINK WITH PUIG
The Puig group has highlighted that Rabanne played an important role in the history of many of the successes of the fashion and beauty company, with fragrances such as Paco Rabanne pour Homme and 1 Million.
The collaboration between the two began at the end of the 1960s when Antonio and Mariano Puig (the second generation of the company) established an agreement with him in Paris.
Puig’s executive president, Marc Puig, has said that “his great personality conveyed, through a unique aesthetic, his daring, revolutionary and provocative vision of the world of fashion”.
The president of Puig’s Beauty and Fashion division, Jose Manuel Albesa, has stated that Rabanne “made transgression magnetic. Who else could induce elegant Parisian women to clamor for dresses made of plastic and metal?”