The Plastic and Metal World of Paco Rabanne

As Paco Rabanne passed away two days ago, I thought I would revisit a masterclass I wrote on him for Heroine.com in September 2019. Heroine.com closed down in 2021.

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The traditional definition of clothing—that it was made from fabric or pelts—was turned on its head by Paco Rabanne and his first haute couture collection, “Twelve Unwearable Dresses in Contemporary Materials”, shown in Paris in 1966. Instigating an interest in new materials and techniques, as well as influencing generations of designers, in the course of one collection Paco Rabanne changed fashion history.

A model wearing a plastic disc dress in his first collection, February 1966.

The Basque Francisco Rabaneda Cuervo was born into the haute couture. His mother was the chief seamstress at Eisa, Cristóbal Balenciaga’s first couture house in San Sebastian, Spain. A fellow Basque, Balenciaga moved Rabanne’s family to Paris in 1937 when he opened Balenciaga there following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Raised in Paris, Rabanne went on to study architecture at l'École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in the mid-1950s. While there he earned money doing fashion sketches for Dior and Givenchy and shoe sketches for Charles Jourdan, yet he went on to take a job with August Peret, France’s foremost developer of reinforced concrete, where he worked for over ten years. Enamored with fashion, he looked for ways to incorporate his architectural and engineering training with clothing. By the early 1960s he was designing on the side for couture houses—a beaded cage look at Givenchy, embroidered dresses at Nina Ricci—when he met young, up-and-coming Parisian boutique designers Emmanuelle Khanh, Christiane Bailly, and Michele Rosier. Starting in 1962, Rabanne began designing plastic accessories for them that sold incredibly well in Parisian boutiques and caught the eyes of American department stores. Of them, Rabanne said in 1965: “They came like three bombs into fashion—full of new ideas, madly imaginative. At least, they gave a shock, excitement to dull, conventional RTW. They reflect the young modern spirit in fashion, not too serious. They dare and I like that… Fashion is fun and we understand that.”¹ While still creating their accessories and designing beaded cage-look items for couture houses, he launched his own accessories line for spring 1966 with a range of vividly colored plastic pieces in geometric shapes.

Earrings from Paco Rabanne’s first accessories collection—brightly colored plastic geometric large enough to offset the highly teased hair. Photo by Bert Stern for Vogue, May 1966.