Paco Rabanne's Paris fashion show is a bittersweet memoir

This was the first Paris Fashion Week held in the absence of designer Paco Rabanne, who died last month at the age of 88. Fashion has a very close relationship with death, with history and with its origins. Julien Dossena, creative director of the fashion house since 2014, paid tribute to the metallurgy designer with the autumn winter 2023 2024 runway show, diving deep into his roots and some of his most iconic looks. From 1966 to the present day, the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris has thus housed a bittersweet memory. From the special collection with the Dali Foundation to five archival dresses, here are five tidbits from the Paco Rabanne FW 24-24 show you may have missed.

The words of Dossena for Paco Rabanne.

Dossena told Vogue that he had never met Rabanne. But he said a friend told him the designer was proud of his work, and that was enough for him. To celebrate his death, Julien greeted guests at the fashion show with a dedication placed on each seat. "Thank you for your utopian creative approach that pushed the boundaries of reality. You were among those who changed the way we see the world."

The Tribute Collection

The creative director had actually finished the collection when Paco Rabanne died. After his death, Dossena realised that the collection was a true tribute to the origins of the brand. Indeed, we could see many structured looks on the catwalk, covering the models from head to toe. It's not just the alpaca fabric that covers the body, but also the colour that runs through trousers, tops and belts, all matching.

The collaboration with the Dalí Foundation.

Julien Dossena celebrates the historic friendship between Paco Rabanne and Salvador Dalí with a capsule collection with the Dalí Foundation. Five paintings by the surreal painter adorn the 2023 2024 autumn-winter collection, including Les ombres de la nuit tombante (1931) and Table solare (1935). The starting point for the collection was a video of the performance Dalí did with Paco Rabanne. The one in which Amanda Lear presents the Paco Rabanne dress and breaks the sewing machines, a concentration of avant-garde.

Extreme metal

Together with Pierre Cardin and André Courrèges, Rabanne brought a futuristic vision of the space age to fashion in the 1960s. Dossena has taken the designer's iconic pieces to the extreme by taking them to a desert setting, covering them in faux leather and assembling them into a hyper-structured, sharp suit that resembles armour.
The nostalgic end

Il finale nostalgico

The show concludes with six dresses from the archives of the house of Paco Rabanne. Inspirations include the dress made of aluminium squares and rectangles worn by Canadian actress Joanna Shimkus in Robert Enrico's 1967 film Les aventuriers, the dress made of hammered metal circles that Naomi Campbell featured in an editorial in the mid-2000s, and the minidress worn by French singer Françoise Hardy on the cover of Elle magazine on 13 July 1966, photographed by Jean.