Paco Rabanne

Paco Rabanne, (born Francisco Rabaneda Cuervo on February 18, 1934 in San Sebastian (Donostia in Basque) in the Spanish Basque Country), is a fashion designer. He fled Spain for France with his mother when the Spanish Civil War broke out. He originally had an architect's education but became known as the enfant terrible of the French fashion world in the 1960s.

Rabanne started his career in fashion by creating jewelery for Givenchy, Dior and Balenciaga. He started his own fashion house in 1966. He used such unconventional materials as metal, paper and plastic for his outlandish and flamboyant designs.

Today Paco Rabanne is very popular fragrance line with 35 fragrances.

Paco Rabanne is known for his costume designs for such films as Barbarella. Also Françoise Hardy was a big fan of Rabanne's designs.

Rabanne also has an interest in paranormal phenomena, and became infamous for his false prediction of the Russian space station Mir falling to Paris in 1999. Some media referred satirically this episode as "Pacolypse".

In 2005, Rabanne opened the first exhibition of his drawings in Moscow. His reasoning for showing the drawings then was, "I am 72 years old and I wanted to present my drawings this year before disappearing from this planet. I have not shown them to anyone except Salvador Dalí 30 years ago who told me to keep going." One of the black and white sketches depicts a child letting go of a white balloon and a dove into the sky. The scene was inspired by the commemoration ceremony for the Beslan attack, in which 319 hostages were killed, including 186 children, 12 servicemen, and 31 hostage-takers. Rabanne wanted the money that the drawing sold for to go to the women of Beslan.