Throughout his career, the creator, who died this Friday at the age of 88, confided in his mystical beliefs, notably predicting a Parisian apocalypse in 1999.
Clothes, perfume… and prophecies. The Spanish couturier Paco Rabanne, who died this Friday at the age of 88 in his house in Ploudalmézeau (Finistère), was not content to leave his mark in fashion with his creations. He also marked public opinion with his fascination with the occult.
From doomsday predictions to statements about his past lives, the fashion designer’s assumed eccentricities have delighted the media throughout his career and helped shape his media persona.
It was at the age of 60 that Paco Rabanne revealed the details of his interest in the mystical with the book Path (Michel Lafon), published in 1990.
“I started my esoteric research at the age of 7”, he confided to Thierry Ardisson a few years later. “I started going out of my body, doing astral travel.”
“But my grandmother, who was a magician, told me: ‘Shut up, don’t talk about it’. (…) I continued to work in silence and when I reached 60, I said to myself: ‘Basta! I’m at the end of my life, I’m going to bear witness’.”
The 1999 solar eclipse, its apocalypse
Many mystical-spiritual speeches had indeed already come to enamel his career: “I am a medium, I know very well all the prophecies of the times to come”, he had assured in particular in a television report dated 1978. “From time to time, when I walk in the street in Paris I stop, frozen, so much the howls of people burned alive ring in my ears.”
This was his main hobby: the announcement of a cataclysm that would kill Parisians in flames in 1999, detailed in a book called 1999, fire from heaven published by Michel Lafon that year.
He announced the destruction of the French capital by the fall of the Mir station, based on a very personal reading of the prophecies of Nostradamus, which would take place on August 11, the day of the solar eclipse. A book written to alert the population: “I cannot, on this date, retire to the countryside leaving 20 million corpses behind me”, he said in a literary program.
As far as the Gers
Precise, he had announced as early as May in The Dispatch that “a few towns in the South-West will also be affected. Mirande, Auch, Condom, Marmande (Lot-et-Garonne), (which) will receive some debris from the Russian station.”
Words that did not amuse Philippe Martin, then general counsel of the Gers. He had announced “a procedure against Mr. Paco Rabanne for faulty dissemination of information likely to harm the image, tourism and the economy” of the department. Of course, on August 12, Paris and the Gers were still standing.
78,000 years of existence
Believing in reincarnation, he had several times confided in his past lives. He explained that he had been high priest in Thebes and had signed the assassination of Tutankhamun, or else officiated as prostitute mistress of Louis XV. “My earliest memories go back 78,000 years,” he said. During his current life, he also claimed to have received divine and extraterrestrial visits.
His prophecy about the collapse of Paris was not the only one to prove false. In 1978, he predicted in a television report that by the year 2000 haute couture would have become “an archaeological term, outdated, completely swept away by history”. The imprint left by its own collections will have proven the opposite.
