Paco Rabanne’s Reflective Raiment: The Space-Age.

The Spanish designer known for his #SpaceAge asteroid into the fashion world in 1966 and his #futuristicaesthetic, died at the age of 88. A look into the impact in the Swinging Sixties of #PacoRabanne and why his novel #materials made his maison so compelling to the #BraBurning women of the #1960s.

The decade of the 1960s with a rosy glow of carefree youth and miniskirts. Freedom and frivolity are the catch words used to describe those days. With women in this era dressing to align with their liberation, you would often hear … “You’re not going out dressed like that!”. Due to the acceptance and peak of the miniskirt women became more daring through their clothing choices so why not with the materials? Rabanne in a 2002 interview interpreted that “It was time when women became warriors because they had to assert their desire for emancipation. Armour was almost necessary.” Rabanne’s dresses revealed more than they hid, which can be seen in his first collection “Manifesto: Twelve Unwearable Dresses in contemporary materials”. Chairman Marc Puig expressed Rabanne as “A major personality in fashion, his was a daring, revolutionary and provocative vision, conveyed through a unique aesthetic.”

The corking British Pathé footage in 1969 features Rabanne’s usage of novel materials such as plastic, metal, paper and leather. With a commercial script of... “Genuine can-can girls who clank-clank with every movement.” and “If it rains our colour prediction for the coming season is rust.” By this point Paco Rabanne’s designs were considered in high fashion cadre alongside Courrégès and Cardin under the title Space Age. Rabanne delved into the film orbit by designing futuristic costumes for Jane Fonda in the 1968 film Barbarella, in perfect keeping with the film’s daring tone. Followed the birth of a whole new trend of sexy lamé garments for an evil queen who objectifies her innocence.

Many women, who were able to lay their hands on a sewing machine, made their own clothes to wear to the local dance hall. According to Vogue, Rabanne would later sell DIY kits made up of discs, rings, and pliers so the self-reliant woman could make her own silver-disk couture at home. The beautiful chainmail dresses of the medieval era and the artistic dresses with nostalgia feeling tried to bring fashion to a modern but unknown future. Starting of the space-age fashion era meant a “rocket” that “launches” to the world thousands of elegantly created cloths with aesthetics styling inspired by the space age.