In 1966, the Spanish couturier Paco Rabanne presented his breakout collection, ‘Twelve Unwearable Dresses in Contemporary Materials’. An evolution of an earlier project, as well as his work creating plastic accessories for Parisian houses like Schiaparelli, Balenciaga and Givenchy in the early 1960s, the collection of abbreviated mini dresses were fashioned from futuristic panels of aluminium and iridescent plastic, joined together with metal rings to evoke chainmail.
The audacious designs would send a jolt through Paris’ traditional haute couture salons – ‘he’s not a couturier, he’s a metal worker,’ Coco Chanel is said to have sniped – and posited the designer, who first trained as an architect, as fashion’s enfant terrible. Alongside fellow couturiers André Courrèges and Pierre Cardin, and furniture designers such as Verner Panton, Arne Jacobsen and Eero Aarnio, he was deemed responsible for ushering in the ‘space age’ spirit of the late 1960s, which used post-war industrial materials to create a gleaming, utopian vision of the future. ‘I defy anyone to design a hat, coat or dress that hasn’t been done before,’ Rabanne said in 1966. ‘The only new frontier left in fashion is the finding of new materials.’
