Monsieur Dire
PARIS — The 65-year-old onetime Spanish war refugee who grew up to become what Coco Chanel called “the metallurgist of fashion” retired this summer from haute couture, presenting one last flamboyant collection--but hardly going quietly.
In a book that has climbed into the French bestseller lists, Paco Rabanne, an avowed mystic who believes he is the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian priest and an 18th century prostitute in the court of Louis XV, is predicting that Paris will be destroyed on the very day much of Europe witnesses a solar eclipse. That is supposed to happen in five days.
“On Aug. 11, at 11:22 a.m, the Mir space station will crash down upon the capital, killing thousands of innocent people,” Rabanne has been warning the French and anyone else who will listen.
Understatement has never been this man’s problem. Rabanne has always been on fashion’s cutting edge, handling needle and pliers with equal skill. At 32, he presented his first collection of apparel, titled “12 Experimental and Unwearable Dresses in Modern Material.”
An iconoclast from the start, he mixed cloth and metal, leather and plastic.
Shocking and disturbing at the time, his creations grew to be recognized the world over as products of a unique talent. Into Rabanne’s works of art of debatable comfort have slipped some famous female forms of the late 20th century--including Jane Fonda, Audrey Hepburn and Ursula Andress.
“I am always searching for new materials not for their shapes, but for the way light plays on them and their textures. If I am a designer, it is to find new textures,” Rabanne said in an interview, just before announcing that this summer’s high-fashion collection would be his last.
Those clothes were every bit as provocative as his new book. Cylindrical dresses made of fur dyed a shocking pink jostled for space on the runway with outfits adorned with aluminum-like metal feathers.
“I don’t want to do like [John] Galliano, who for the 10th time remakes a dress fit for a whore in a 1925-era bordello, even if it is beautifully done,” Rabanne said. “We’ve had our fill of that.”
Making dresses that unabashedly proclaim themselves “unwearable” is not Rabanne’s only activity. He says he’ll keep working on his Paco line of ready-to-wear clothing and accessories. And, like many of his prestigious competitors, he has his own fragrances, including Calandre, XS and Metal.
Born Francisco Cuervo Rabaneda in San Sebastian in Spain’s Basque country, the designer was 7 when the surviving members of his family were forced to flee by the Franco dictatorship. His father had been killed for refusing to give up his support of the Republican cause, and his mother was a Socialist.
As Rabanne explained in an earlier book, “Journey,” growing up during the Spanish Civil War and the onset of World War II made him an adult by age 8.
Despite such trauma--or was it because of it?--Rabanne experienced his first mystical experiences. “I’ve been a medium since I was 7. I play with time and space, it is very easy for me,” he told a reporter one recent morning in his Parisian studio. “I first escaped from my body at age 7.”
Since his latest book, “Le Feu du Ciel,” (Fire From the Sky), has appeared, the designer has been ridiculed in the media as “a weirdo who has fallen on his head,” “a nut case” and a “clown searching for publicity.” But Rabanne says he has received 200 letters thanking him for advance warning of Paris’ imminent demise.
The genesis of that story came long ago, in 1951, when he was a 17-year-old student of architecture in Paris. Walking along the Seine to attend class one morning, he froze, transfixed by what he thought were cries of human terror. He was having a vision.
“I saw people on fire, jumping in the river but still in flames. Even though I covered my ears, I could still hear them screaming with pain,” he remembers.
It took the couturier years of reading the prophecies of Nostradamus, the 14th century French seer, to interpret the moment. Rabanne’s quest reached fruition five years ago, when he met a researcher from the French National Scientific Research Institute who told him about Mir, the Russians’ 140-ton space station orbiting the Earth, and the plutonium it carries.
In one of his obscurely worded quatrains, No. 72 in the 10th set of 100 predictions, Nostradamus speaks of a “great king” descending from the sky in what corresponds to the eighth month of the year 1999. Until he met the researcher and learned about Mir and the radioactive and highly toxic isotope aboard, Rabanne says, “I thought what Nostradamus described in his prophecies about a force destroying Paris was a meteorite.”
Now, “it is clear and perfectly understandable. You just have to read it to get it.”
According to other references he has decoded in Nostradamus, Rabanne says, it’s obvious most of Mir will fall on eastern Paris--the horrific scene the designer glimpsed almost half a century ago in his anticipatory vision. Smaller fragments will shear off and hit France close to its border with Spain, he says.
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For five years, Rabanne has been certain of the truth of his awful vision, although he says he prayed constantly to avert it. His retirement from haute couture last month made little noise compared with the media coverage he has received for his predictions.
“I’ve had the guts to write this book although I knew I would be insulted and laughed at,” he says. “The Virgin Mary told me I should keep talking and that she would protect me.”
With his worldwide name recognition, Rabanne says he was afraid his apocalyptic forecast might tarnish his reputation. “I am a business. I sell a lot of perfumes. I feared this book would be prejudicial to my reputation,” Rabanne said. “The company that owns my trademark had the same opinion.”
But he decided that it was more important to heed the dictates of his conscience--and published. Three months on, the book has sold more than 94,000 copies and has risen as high as No. 4 on L’Express’ nonfiction bestseller list. There are no plans to translate the book into English--unless Paris is destroyed, specifies Rabanne’s secretary, Chantal Delinot.
At his brightly lit atelier in the tony St. Germain-des-Pres neighborhood on the Left Bank, Rabanne works amid an oil painting of Jesus Christ and a small statue of Buddha meditating in the lotus position.
For the moment, he says, he has no plans for the future. On the day Mir levels Paris or doesn’t, he will be in the faraway province of Brittany praying the French capital is spared. He sleeps well, he says, because he has told his fellow Parisians what is coming.
“Now I know I was put on Earth to do that,” he says.
Whatever transpires, Rabanne plans to launch another perfume, called Ultraviolet, and present a new ready-to-wear collection this autumn. His retirement after nearly 3 1/2 decades from the pressure-cooker world of haute couture came “after common reflection by the company and Mr. Rabanne,” said Remy Clero, general director of Paco Rabanne, the company that manages the designer’s fashion and perfume lines. “We thought it was time for him to focus on creations for the Paco line, and he fully agreed.”
