Paco Rabanne

March 9, 2022

The Space-Age is amongst us again, ironically at a time when finding an adjustable mortgage rate on Mars seems less and less absurd. So it's only fitting that the “Man of Steel” Paco Rabanne, a pillar of the space age aesthetic, had a resurgence with his arguably most innovative style/product. Informed by the 1966 couture collection series titled “ 12 Unwearable Dresses”. Paco Rabanne joins aluminum plates and metal rings to aestheticize the once protective armor of the Medieval era. The appearance of chain-mail is just an example of the houses ability to subvert and cite historical garments during the space-age era. Unlike his contemporaries Courrèges, and Cardin, Paco explored uncharted areas of material imaginative production methods using novel postwar industrial materials. Women during that time often described his metal work designs as liberating, empowering, a suit of armor of some sort. One woman noted. 'The clothes themselves were at first quite heavy, but when you got them on -- and I had to try them on -- they were balanced in a very beautiful way, in a very engineered way. He was able to work metal on a woman's body, where curves were needed. And the sounds these dresses made, I was fascinated.'' Coco Chanel once said ''He's not a couturier. He's a metal worker.'' The mirrored disc-like shapes, which has arguably become the houses most iconic symbol, uses Rhodoid (or cellulose acetate). The discs have been linked together with hundreds of small metal jump rings, a type of hardware that is typically reserved for jewelry. Though the discs have been layered in bands across the breasts and hips in a gesture towards modesty, the abbreviated hemline, and the interstitial glimpses of skin that the garment exposes embody the period tendency to celebrate and display a youthful figure.