Paco Rabanne died this Friday February 3, 2022 in Portsall, Brittany. The 88-year-old fashion designer was also known for his eccentric predictions.
[Mise à jour le 3 février à 15h27] The fashion world is in mourning. Francisco Rabaneda y Cuervo, more commonly known as Paco Rabanne, died this Friday, February 3, 2022 announcement The Telegram. Information confirmed at Point by the brand. This great Franco-Spanish couturier was 88 years old. He died in the town of Portsall, in Finistère, where he had taken up residence since the beginning of the 2000s. his eccentricity. Born in Spain in 1934, he had arrived in France to flee the civil war which was raging on the other side of the Pyrenees. And it was in France, where he trained and then developed professionally, that he made his career with the success that we know of him.
Who was Paco Rabanne?
Francisco Rabaneda y Cuervo was born on February 18, 1934 in Pasajes, Spain, in the Basque Country region. With his mother, they fled the civil war in Spain and settled in France, in Brittany. His father, a colonel in the Spanish republican forces, did not accompany them and was killed by Franco’s troops. It was in Morlaix that Paco Rabanne grew up, before heading to Paris to study at the National School of Fine Arts. After graduating, he launched into making accessories for haute couture clothing, before presenting his first collection in 1966, which clashed, made up of Rhodoïd and metal.
Over the years, he forged a solid reputation in the capital and never stopped designing clothes, including some for Françoise Hardy. Follower of experiments with new materials (paper, metal in particular), he splits by the lack of use of the thread and the needle, as his detractors said. Paco Rabanne experienced the peak of his career in 1990 when he received the Dé d’or, a title awarded for the best haute couture collection. Beyond clothing, it is in perfumery that he also made a name for himself, developing perfumes from the 1970s and which were part of his success.
At the same time, he launched a magazine, opened a production house, a recording, rehearsal and production link, and ran a club. His personality is also remembered for his many, often wacky predictions.
Paco Rabanne and the fall of the Mir space station
The best known remains that of the fall of the Mir space station in Paris. On May 10, 1999, Paco Rabanne was invited to the program “On s’entretien de vous”, broadcast on France 3. On this occasion, the couturier comes to talk about a prophecy he would have seen, setting Paris on fire, and which he recounts in the 1999 book: fire from the sky. The man then predicted the fall of the Mir station (space station of the Soviet Union) on the capital on the day of the total eclipse scheduled for August 11 of the same year. In an archive published on the site of theINAPaco Rabanne explains:
“When I was 17, I had flashes, arriving in Paris, of people burning alive, screaming and I saw these people throwing themselves into the Seine. I started to study all the prophecies. All the prophecies said that one day the capital of Gaul would burn. But by what fire? Two years ago, I had incredible flashes and I thought that a comet, something fiery, was going to come on Paris, falling from the sky. I realized while speaking with a CNRS researcher that nothing fell from the sky, except perhaps, he told me, Mir. And in Mir, there is plutonium and, perhaps, an atomic battery or worse. And it is this worst that I have seen because all the prophecies speak of it. I even found in Nostradamus the name of Mir. The prophecies of other seers who announce these destructions of Paris during the darkness of a day. It is the eclipse which is announced.”
The fall, announced for August 11 therefore, obviously does not occur. Before this date, Paco Rabanne had declared to be silent “forever” if nothing happened, adding: “Never again will I speak of prophecies or this theme, anywhere.”