Fashion Reverie looks back at Paco Rabanne’s iconic metal mini dress. Francisco Rabeneda Cuervo, commonly known as Paco Rabanne created the chain mail mini dress as a part of his 1967 couture collection.
Paco Rabanne started his fashion career by creating jewelry for Nina Ricci, Pierre Cardin, Courréges, Givenchy, and Balenciaga. He opened his own fashion house in 1966, and he was known for creating fashion forward, sometimes futuristic designs out of such unconventional materials as plastic, metal and paper.
Audrey Hepburn in Paco Rabanne dress in “Two for the Road”
In his first collection entitled “12 Unwearable Dresses in Contemporary Materials,” Rabanne experimented with dresses embellished with rhodoid sequins and plagues. A similar aesthetic popped up in his couture 1967 collection in which Rabanne used metal, aluminum, plastics and other unconventional materials linked together to resemble medieval chain mail. Paco Rabanne created a garment with a similar aesthetic made of acrylic discs threaded together with thin metal chains for Audrey Hepburn in the 1967 film Two for the Road.
Paco Rabanne Metallic Dress, 1996
In 1996 Paco Rabanne revisited the mini dress made of unconventional materials. Paco Rabanne announced his retirement in 1999. And in 2010, Rabanne was made an Officer of the Legion D’Honneur by the French minister of culture.
—Staff
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