The Revenge of Paco Rabanne: Back from Mars and Better Than Ever

This Space Age fashion brand is rising from the moon dust.

One of my favorite activities during the pandemic was smoking a joint on my front porch, collapsing into my empty bathtub and doomscrolling my way through The RealReal. My phone in hand, I went on a mental vacation out of seiged suburbia. The archival fashion on The RealReal were the bad boys throwing rocks at my window, calling to me to run away with them.

If accepting mundanity was my Count Paris, the Paco Rabanne archive on The RealReal was my Romeo, daring me to dream bigger from beneath my windowsill. I’d only ever seen these pieces worn in old photos of 1960s starlets. The effect is nothing short of surreal to see  the shimmery pieces worn in magazines and nightclubs by my favorite icons Francoise Hardy and Donyale Luna.. And yet there they were: the iconic chain-link midi skirts, the square neckline crop tops, the gold-to-silver-gradient sequin pants. I held the gateway to my fashion dreams in the palm of my hand, with the chance to step into it within five to seven business days for $830 to $2000. 

Of course this is by Paco Rabanne’s design, the Spanish brand has always strived to disrupt the monotony of a culture slow to evolve. Rabanne, born Francisco Rabaneda Cuervo, caused a widespread uproar among cultural circles in the brand’s early years. Designers of popular, conventional luxury garments were skeptical of his industrial clothing. Even Coco Chanel called him “a metal worker” as opposed to a fashion designer. His 1966 collection, Twelve Unwearable Dresses, proved that he was more than that - he was a visionary with a romantic interpretation of what it means to embody strength through fashion. 

Those clothes communicated how inspired Rabanne was by the optimistic vision of the 1960’s. He depicted women as space-age silver sirens, tough as (literal) metal and as playful or conventionally feminine as they chose to be. These clothes were embraced as symbols of women’s liberation by the world of cinema. Several of Jane Fonda’s dresses that Jacques Fonteray made for Barbarella (1968) were heavily inspired by them and a group of supermodels hold James Bond and Miss Moneypenny at gunpoint wearing Rabanne dresses in Casino Royale (1967). They’re even parodied in William Klein’s Qui Etes Vous, Polly Maggoo? (1966) when models get injuries from the metallic dresses they’re made to wear. 

His clothing became associated with women who were ambitious, placing themselves in the thick of the action. The attention grabbing sight of a Paco Rabanne piece went hand in hand with a generation fighting to be heard.

I can still see the influence of these clothes today in the fashion and political world. Balmain’s 2024 Spring/Summer show featured coats and sweaters beaded with hundreds of tiny crystals that formed gigantic eyes and lips when seen from afar. For their 2024 Haute Couture show, Schiaparelli sent models down the runway in robot dresses, made entirely from computer chips and Swarovski crystals. Look six featured a model cradling a robot toddler in her arms. Moments in fashion like these are strong signifiers of a renewed but urgent sense of future-focused, optimistic escapism. They suggest themes of female autonomy and maximalist genderqueer visibility in a time when bigotry is insidious throughout the workforce and the legal system.  Pieces like these evoke those same values expressed by Rabanne, practically screaming to the audience:

1. ‘I am autonomous’

2. ‘My faith in my future will outlive the oppression I currently face’

3. ‘I will live my life loudly’

Despite what seems like an onslaught of targeted racial and gender based political violence for the past two decades, Paco Rabanne— once a champion against injustice—has only come back with a vengeance in recent years. The brand made waves in fashion news last year when Rabanne passed away. This was followed by the brand name being shortened to ‘Rabanne’ for their 60th anniversary. They closed out this press cycle by announcing a collaboration with H&M. They were sending a message: it was time to put their Barbarella cape on and save the day again. The phases of accelerationist hope and pessimistic nostalgia that Western society cycles through effected the label. Although they were still making clothes, the interest had waned and left Rabanne wondering if they were the hero we really needed.

Fashion began to trend toward form fitting, gendered silhouettes in the late 1970s. Rabanne took it upon himself to shut down operations of the brand’s Haute Couture sect in 1999 and retired, placing his ready to wear in indefinite hiatus. 2024 is an interesting time for the brand’s influence to permeate so heavily in pop culture. While a strong half of the culture is embracing futuristic maximalism again, there’s another half nostalgic for the simplicity of Y2K trends like ‘corpcore’ and ‘quiet luxury’. Perhaps dealing with the consequences of capitalist greed in the 21st century is what’s steering fashion lovers away from maximalism, which has been a symbol for ignorant wealth throughout history.

Luxury and avant garde fashion in Canada has been a huge missed opportunity in the retail market. We don’t have a large enough population of wealthy residents and our cities are not big enough to justify having an abundance of luxury stores. Last year we saw Nordstrom fail as a result of selling exclusively maximalist, high price items in low-income neighborhoods. 

Fashion lovers in Toronto are now prioritizing consignment and thrift shopping to find their clothes. Some are boycotting shopping altogether as a way to ease Western guilt during times of war. On one hand, our attraction to rehashing fashion’s tamer past can be seen as a selfish indulgence. We crave a time when all that mattered was importing your Nelly Furtado ‘Loose’ CD to iTunes. On the other, it can potentially be seen as a soft protest towards capitalism and how maximalism can represent consumerist values.

And yet, for all its maximalism, I believe Paco Rabanne stands out from their capitalist contemporaries. Not only because of it’s ‘vintage’ status but for the environmental merit of the materials themselves. Every metallic Paco Rabanne piece is a walking endorsement of recycling. In the wake of a cotton shortage, they also act as previews into what the future of our clothing may be like. 

What helps the brand balance its accelerationism with its integrity is that Rabanne did not compromise the label’s values for financial gain. To this day you can still expect a space-age thesis in their collections and when Rabanne was pushed to conform he threw in the towel with pride. For this commitment, Paco Rabanne is worthy of being the luxury leader we need in such uncertain times. I’m counting on them to don  sparkly silver spy gear and empower us to take on the future one last time.