Opinion – Normalitas: Paco Rabanne: visionary, futurist… and mystic

“In my land, daughter my, there are many witchessss. My grandmother, my mother, my aunts: I was raised by witches“.

We were at the back of a century-old candle shop, in an alley in the medieval district of Tarragona, a coastal city an hour from Barcelona.

Covered by a diaphanous curtain, we watched the coming and going of tourists on the street, eager to register millenary arches, tombstones embedded in walls, caressed-chiseled stones-disputed by Moors, Romans and Vikings.

Javi was a Basque man already gone from the years. Her black turtleneck sweater contrasted with her impossibly red hair and the hellish summer heat. He spoke slow and lisping, the words as if they were drunkenly dragging feathers across the Oscar carpets. He read the tarot to me.

That afternoon, my Personal Superstition Number 181708979 was born: the Basques, those northern people who speak a language of unknown origin, with a reputation for being both affable and rude, Saint Witches.

***

I remembered the distant conversation with Javi when I learned of the death of the Spanish-Basque designer Paco Rabanne, aged 88, this past Friday (3).

About Paco’s basic biography, newspaper obituaries already speak a lot: that he lost his father shot during the Spanish Civil War; that his mother, a seamstress for Balenciaga, who was also Basque, went into exile in France with her 4 children, Paco, who was then 5 years old; and that it would be in this neighboring land that, years later, he would triumph as an innovator, futurist, architect.

In fact, Rabanne — born Francisco Rabaneda Cuervo — studied architecture in Paris. Hence, possibly, that his creations transcended fabrics, seams and traditional models.

Paco’s iconic (anti)dresses were elaborate, investable constructions, made of materials such as metal or the “rhodoid”, small thermoplastic plates made of cellulosic compounds, a legacy of his period as a goldsmith of accessories for haute couture brands in Parrí.

He collected muses: from Jane Fonda in Barbarella, Audrey Hepburn in Two for The Road or the cutie Françoise Hardy to zillions of modern celebrities, socialites-actresses-topmodels and singers like Rihanna and Lady Gaga.

***

But my point is that Paco was in fact also half a witch, or fully.

Fanatical about occultism, astrology and apocalyptic prophecies, he wrote several related books. He had a craving for imagining the end of the world.

In one version, according to him, Paris would be destroyed by the Mir space station — a very personal interpretation of a prediction by Nostradamus.

Paco also believed in ETs, he swore that he was 75,000 years old and that an ancestor of his had killed Tutankhamun. In one of her many incarnations, she would have been a prostitute. Not just any: lover of Louis XV.

Her first women’s perfume was born in 1969, a year steeped in civic and cultural revolutions.

Called Calandre, that’s how Paco summed up his vision at the time: the fragrance would evoke a couple making out on the hood of a car on the beach. Sandalwood, vetiver and lily notes have never had so much appeal.

It could be a Basque thing created by witches. I don’t know. Pero que las hay, las hay, and some certainly cast their spell on that brilliant Spaniard from Guipúzcoa.

***

Like Paco, my dear friend Javi also hails from that mysterious confluence between the provinces of the Basque Country and Navarra, where both warlike and mystical stories abound — including one of the most famous, a lamentable episode from the time of the Spanish Inquisition, known as the witches of Zugarramurdi (for a next column!).

Javi unveils the cards from an old Camoin-Jodorowsky deck. His fingers, as they glide across the shiny surfaces of kings and popes and wheels of fortune, tremble.

Former makeup artist for fashion shows for brands such as Yves Saint Laurent, Javi had to leave the profession because he could no longer control his hands precisely. But precisely for that reason, he says, he accepted taking on the family business as a challenge.

When I knew him, he spent his days in this wonderful shop covered from top to bottom with candles of all kinds. Painted, carved, decorated. Coming into the world by your trembling hands. That, when they touched the paraffin, they landed and rested. Magic, he told me, slowly savoring the ggggg. The magic of creation…

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