"To say that Paco Rabanne marches to his own drummer is an understatement," the New York Times wrote in 2002. In 1999 he predicted in his book Fire From Heaven that Paris would be destroyed later that year when the Russian space station Mir crashed down to Earth - a claim derived from his reading of the 16th-century French seer Nostradamus. He claimed to have had multiple lives, to have been some 78 000 years old, to have made love to the Earth, seen God and been visited by aliens. It marked his entry into perfumes that would see his name become synonymous with cologne, ultimately even eclipsing his fame as a designer.Įver the provocateur, Rabanne had a penchant for mysticism and esoterism. Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent (1 August 1936 1 June 2008), referred to as Yves Saint Laurent or YSL, was a French fashion designer who, in 1962. He began his fashion career creating accessories - jewellery, ties, buttons - that caught the attention of Christian Dior, Yves Saint-Laurent and Pierre Cardin.Īfter the media furore around his own line, Rabanne signed a deal in 1968 that brought him under the ownership of the Barcelona-based Puig family, heavyweights in the fashion and fragrance industry. In 1939 his family fled to France and Rabanne went on to study at the Beaux-Arts university in Paris, graduating with a diploma in architecture. Rabanne's life was uprooted by the Spanish Civil War when the army of dictator Francisco Franco turned on his father, a commander of the Guernica garrison, and gunned him down in 1936. "Of going as far as is reasonable for one's time and not indulge in the morbid pleasure of the known things, which I view as decay."įrancisco Rabaneda-Cuervo was born in 1934 in Spain's Basque region, near the city of San Sebastian, where his mother was a seamstress for the designer Cristobal Balenciaga and his father was an army general. "I have always had the impression of being a time accelerator," he wrote in typically enigmatic style for a retrospective at Antwerp's fashion museum MoMu in 2016. His 1966 show brought immediate fame and notoriety when he stunned the audience with "12 Unwearable Dresses", his models dancing barefoot down the catwalk in outfits made of sharp metal and other unlikely materials. It must never be finished.’Ī decade after his death, it’s safe to say his legacy is still very much ongoing, even if he did hate it.Rabanne started out as a co-creator of the 1960s space-age movement in fashion alongside designers such as Pierre Cardin, who incorporated the era's giddy excitement around the future and technological advancements into their clothes. He writes feverishly from the moment he gets up and all through the night, as a form of therapy. The one thing that truly brings him joy is writing. What of men in skirts, though? ‘If men wanted to look good in a skirt, they would need the body of an African. I believed women wanted this and was right.’ ‘I wanted women to have the same basic wardrobe as a man. All the skinny jean-clad gals out there owe a large debt to the designer who pioneered trousers for women when it was still unheard of for us to wear anything without a gusset. A show terrifies me.’ĭespite his distaste for the industry, Saint Laurent has had a significant impact on the wardrobes we modern women take for granted. Does he enjoy the success? ‘I hate fashion,’ he says. Based upon a picture of the artist, he created a model of a cult dress with black lines and blocks of primary color. The interview takes place the day after Saint Laurent’s latest collection is unveiled in Paris, where women had screamed ‘Long live Yves Saint Laurent!’ from the balconies of his salon. Yves Saint Laurent was inspired by a book about Piet Mondrian, which his mother had given him.
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