French fashion designer Olivier Rousteing greets the audience at the end of the Balmain show during Paris Fashion Week, women's spring-summer 2024 collection, in Paris, on September 27, 2023. Photo Julien de Rosa/AFP
The sound of chainmail, plates, metallic discs sewn together like armor made for dancing rather than for war. Paco Rabanne, born Francisco Rabaneda Cuervo in San Sebastián in 1934, the son of a seamstress who worked for Balenciaga, rejected the traditional needle-and-thread tailoring of Charles Frederick Worth. An architect by training, he thought of clothing as one thinks of a bridge or a façade, assembling materials fashion had never before touched: rhodoid, aluminum, metal punched out with a die. In 1966, his "twelve unwearable dresses" scandalized and fascinated in equal measure, and Coco Chanel herself, it is said, called him more a metalworker than a couturier. He wore this scorn like a coat of arms. He dressed Jane Fonda in Barbarella, invented a space-age, futuristic aesthetic that has never quite left the collective...
The sound of chainmail, plates, metallic discs sewn together like armor made for dancing rather than for war. Paco Rabanne, born Francisco Rabaneda Cuervo in San Sebastián in 1934, the son of a seamstress who worked for Balenciaga, rejected the traditional needle-and-thread tailoring of Charles Frederick Worth. An architect by training, he thought of clothing as one thinks of a bridge or a façade, assembling materials fashion had never before touched: rhodoid, aluminum, metal punched out with a die. In 1966, his "twelve unwearable dresses" scandalized and fascinated in equal measure, and Coco Chanel herself, it is said, called him more a metalworker than a couturier. He wore this scorn like a coat of arms. He dressed Jane Fonda in Barbarella, invented a space-age, futuristic aesthetic that has never quite left the...
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