Paco Rabanne: Celebrated designer dies aged 88

Famous perfume and clothing designer Paco Rabanne passed away at age 88 in his French home.

The parent business of his brands, Puig, announced his passing and said that he had “marked generations with his bold vision of fashion and his legacy will live on.”

Rabanne’s unusual clothing creations brought him international acclaim. Rabanne’s work, which, in the words of Puig’s fashion president José Manuel Albesa, “made transgression magnetic,” was praised.

Rabanne was hailed as a “important personality in fashion” by Marc Puig, chairman and chief executive officer of Puig, for his “daunting, revolutionary, and provocative perspective, delivered through a unique aesthetic.”

In the Basque area of Spain, not far from the city of San Sebastian, Rabanne was born into a military family. In 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, Gen. Francisco Franco’s nationalist forces assassinated his father, a colonel in the Republican military.

After the Nationalist troops captured Madrid and won the war in 1939, his mother, who had previously worked as a seamstress for fashion designer Cristobal Balenciaga, relocated the family to Paris.

Rabanne was raised in the French capital before enrolling at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts to study architecture, where he also worked as a freelance illustrator.

His innovations permeated every facet of his enterprise. In the middle of the 1990s, he was one of the first scent creators to introduce a product online.
Rabanne withdrew from the fashion industry in 1999, having spent years as one of the leading pioneers in the sector. He hardly appeared in the media for the next 24 years.

The company praised him as a “visionary” and called him “among the most important fashion figures of the 20th Century” in a statement posted on Paco Rabanne’s official Instagram. It said, “His legacy will continue to serve as a source of inspiration.”

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