Giorgio Armani: Paco Rabanne is another radical innovator lost in the fashion world

Giorgio Armani said Paco Rabanne’s passing at the age of 88 marks the death of “another radical innovator” who has just been lost by the fashion world.

The 88-year-old Italian fashion designer paid tribute to Rabanne, with whom he fought in perfume sales, saying he was a “true futurist”.

In a statement on his company’s Twitter account, Armani wrote: “Fashion continues to lose radical innovators who were able to invent worlds and perspectives from scratch.

“Paco Rabanne is a true futurist (and) an experimentalist (who is) always looking to the future, always looking to tomorrow.”

Rabanne’s death follows the deaths of Dame Vivienne Westwood, dubbed the Godmother of Punk, who died in December at the age of 81, and Japanese fashion designer Hanae Mori, 96, and designer French fashionista Thierry Mugler, 73, both died in January last year.

While recalling the effect that Rabanne’s green Barbarella costume – worn by Jane Fonda as an astronaut in the 1968 science fiction film – had on him, Armani also wrote that the fashion designer had “unmistakable talent”.

He added that it was “sad” to have a “visionary leave us”.

Rabanne’s fashion house was commercially successful with many of his fragrances, and his debut fragrance Calandre, first launched in 1969, continues to this day.

Armani’s first fragrance line was Giorgio by Giorgio Beverly Hills in the 1980s, a fragrance that is being sold today.

In other tributes, Julien Dossena, who took over from Rabanne as head of his fashion label, paid tribute on Instagram by “thanking” him for being a fashion designer who defined “modernity” and “cultural revolution”.

He also writes that he is “a holistic artist” who uses the expression “personal utopia” to develop his view of the world.

Canadian model Stacey McKenzie wrote on Instagram: “One of the most humble designers I’ve been fortunate enough to meet, hang out with and model for.

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“Thank you for being Paco Rabanne, you will miss it.”

Television personality, who has rated Canada’s Top Model and Canada’s Drag Race, has also modeled for Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier.

Bruno Pavlovsky, president of the Federation of Haute Couture and Fashion – who runs Paris Fashion Week, said in a statement: “Paco Rabanne is a great fashion designer who never stops exploring. Traditional know-how and new techniques with boldness and eccentricity.

“A couturier who has been breaking new ground in fashion since his first show in Paris.”

The organization’s executive chairman, Pascal Morand, also said: “A fashion icon, passionate about innovation through the use of materials, Paco Rabanne is a liberator with creative freedoms. has left a deep mark on French and international fashion.”

Rabanne, whose real name is Francisco Rabaneda Cuervo, founded his eponymous fashion house in 1966 and was announced on Friday by the company’s official Instagram account.