A farewell to couture
This season marks Paco Rabanne's last Haute Couture collection, thirty years after founding his line and revolutionizing couture/clothing design. The announcement was made by the Catalan group Puig, but Rabanne will continue to supervise the ready-to-wear and perfume lines. Despite a standing ovation, the designer made just a brief appearance after the presentation for a farewell gesture to his aficionados. With this final collection he offers us a veritable festival of his trademark talents. First off, a leather patchwork resembling stained glass ? complete with a masked Venetian carnival harlequin ? is used on coats, frock coats, skirt suits with prominent shoulders, lantern dresses, pantsuits, doublets with giant sleeves and capes with imitation fur borders and tails, in bright shades of scarlet, shocking pink, daffodil yellow, electric blue, acid green and ultraviolet. These are followed by a multitude of small, fluid dresses and sheaths in scintillating metal jersey with Mondrian-style geometric motifs or else trompe l'oeil deceptions, such as a dress which appears to be a pinafore over a sailor's sweater or a vest. Fringed ensembles in shiny knit, metal knit sweaters and pourpoint jewels on straight-leg velvet pants reveal Rabanne's talent as a silversmith. A black chiffon sheath is adorned with violet and rhinestone "oil filter" flowers and metal corsages decorate velvet skirts. The end of the show featured strange extra-terrestrial dresses covered with thin, spiny bristles silk screened with the images of various monuments: the Reichstag in Berlin, the Atomium of Brussels, Sidney's Opera house, the Statue of Liberty, and finally, Paris - a city under reprieve - according to the prophetic designer. The bride was a modified czarina for the new millennium, wrapped up in her fur coat-dress embroidered with golden tulips and adorned with a tall mantilla in gold lace.
Virginie Transon
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