Established in 1966, Parisian fashion house Paco Rabanne has asserted a distinctive identity resulting from the synthesis of cutting-edge contemporary design and radical craft. Mr Paco Rabanne was born Francisco Rabaneda y Cuervo in 1934 in Spanish Basque Country. At the age of five, he and his mother, a head seamstress at Balenciaga, escaped the Spanish Civil War by fleeing to France, where he assumed the name Paco Rabanne. By the early 1960s, after training as an architect, he applied his skills towards avant-garde accessory design, proposing unique creations for several haute couture houses. For the debut of his namesake brand in 1966, he presented Manifesto, 12 unwearable dresses in contemporary materials. Over the next few years, he would experiment with looks made from molded plastics, hammered metal, aluminum jersey and knitted fur that were at once sculptural. His iconic chainmail dresses helped define an era of shape-shifting fashion and remain emblematic of the house still today.