Rabanne

Rabanne

Paco Rabanne, born Francisco Rabaneda Cuervo and trained as an architect, founded his house in Paris in 1966 with a debut collection of dresses built from metal and plastic plates linked like chainmail, a look Coco Chanel reportedly dismissed by calling him a metal worker rather than a couturier. The house's futurist, industrial materials went on to dress Jane Fonda in Barbarella, and after Julien Dossena was named creative director in 2013 the label sharpened that archive into contemporary ready-to-wear before dropping Paco from its name in 2023.

Dresses

The house's founding idea was a dress that behaved like armor, plates of metal and plastic linked into something closer to chainmail than fabric, and that DNA still surfaces in the dresses here even when the construction is softer. It is one of the few genuinely traceable throughlines in contemporary fashion, from a 1966 debut collection to a current designer reinterpreting it.

Bags

Rabanne's handbags carry forward hardware and metal-plate detailing that nods directly to the house's chainmail origins, including reworked versions of archive shapes the brand has revisited under its current creative direction. It is a more wearable expression of an idea that started out as deliberately unwearable.

Tops and shirting

Tops translate the house's metallic, industrial-materials instinct into something closer to daily wear, a long way from the founder's original plastic-and-metal experiments but still recognizably in conversation with them. Dossena has spent his tenure making that founding radicalism legible for a customer who is not dressing for a runway.

Skirts

The skirts lean into the same metallic construction and unconventional materials the house has been known for since Paco Rabanne first started working with plates and rings instead of needle and thread. It remains one of the more literal design signatures in this edit, easy to trace back to a specific designer and a specific year.

More from the collection

The rest of the edit fills out a house that spent decades as a fragrance-driven name before Dossena's 2013 appointment gave the ready-to-wear side new commercial weight. It is a broader look at a label built on one very specific, very well-documented founding idea.

Our honest take

Rabanne has one of the cleanest founding stories in fashion, a single 1966 collection whose radicalism is still legible in the current designs, which is rarer than it sounds for a house this old. The 2023 name change and years of leadership transition mean the identity is still being actively rewritten, so this edit reads best as a snapshot of a house mid-repositioning rather than a settled, finished aesthetic.