The Spanish designer Paco Rabanne, who died at the age of 88 after an extensive and eccentric careershocked the fashion world with his daring and impossible-to-wear runway looks in the 1960s. But also, a convinced mystic, he wowed with his prophetic beliefs and statements.
Rabanne, whose real name was Francisco Rabaneda y Cuervo, used metal, plastic and paper to create his space-age designs, leading Coco Chanel to label him as “the metal worker”.
But even though he embodied one of fashion’s newest breaks in style and materials, he never really felt comfortable in that world alone. In fact, the New York Times aptly described it in 2002 as “futurist, couturier, mystic, madman, dadaist, sculptor, architect, astrologer, perfumer, artist and prophet”.
As Rabanne explained in one of his books, growing up during the Spanish Civil War and the start of World War II made him an adult as a child. “I have been a medium since I was 7 years old. I play with time and space, it’s very easy for me. I escaped from my body for the first time at age 7,” she said.
“I have liked esotericism since my earliest childhood. My mother was very pragmatic, but my grandmother was a shaman, she introduced me to the knowledge of the world very early on. Fashion allowed me to earn a living, but it was not really my center of interest” , he explained in an interview in 2005.
“I have always had the impression of being an accelerator of time,” he wrote in typically enigmatic style in 2016. “To go as far as is reasonable for one’s time and not indulge in the morbid pleasure of known things, which I see as decay”.
The designer, who was rarely seen in public after retiring in 1999, was nicknamed ‘Wacko Paco’ and claimed to have reincarnated a multitude of times. He claimed that in one of his lives he was a Parisian prostitute during the reign of Louis XV and, thousands of years before, the Egyptian priest who assassinated Pharaoh Tutankhamen..
Rabanne assured that, in reality, he was 78,000 years old, he affirmed that he had met God on multiple occasions, that he had been visited by aliens and that he had had sexual relations with nothing more, and nothing less, than with the planet Earth.
Adherent to esotericism, predicted in a book in 1999 that Paris would be destroyed that same year when the Russian space station Mir crashed into Earthrelying on a very personal reading of the prophecies of Nostradamus.
Following that book (“Le Feu du Ciel” – “Fire from Heaven”), the designer was ridiculed in the media as “a freak who fell on his head”, “a madman” and a “clown looking for of publicity”.
But Rabanne said he received 200 letters thanking him for the advance warning of Paris’ impending demise. “Now I know they put me on Earth to do that,” he said.
“I had the guts to write this book, even though I knew I would be insulted and laughed at,” he recalled. “The Virgin Mary told me that I should keep talking and that she would protect me.”
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