Fashion house PACO RABANNE presented the Fall Winter 2023.24 Collection, with a show held on March 1st, during the ongoing Paris Fashion Week. In this modern material awakening, Julien Dossena channels the historic friendship between Paco Rabanne and Salvador Dalí: two Spanish visionaries linked by their radical artistic expression. From women outfitted in contemporary armour to landscapes unbound by natural laws, they created parallel and, at times, overlapping worlds that were at once magical, mystic and mysterious.
FALL WINTER 2023.24 COLLECTIONS
Ideas that spring from the unconscious into a white space like a waking dream. A surrealist spirit grounded in a real-world sensibility. Unexpected materials, the perpetual pursuit of Paco Rabanne, emerge with new intrigue. Sensations are translated through the symbolic pillars of design: colour, form, volume, movement. On the surface, this collection reads like an exploration of textures. What looks like fur is hairy wool. Shards of lurex appear sprinkled atop knitwear. Metal mesh seemingly morphs into leather. Gauzy mousseline studded with strass gives an eerie smoked effect, a shimmering shroud. Metallic decoration suggests the coat of a fantastical, mechanized creature. Clear crystals dangling from dresses resemble ice cubes. – from Paco Rabanne
With participation from the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, the collection features four paintings – including The Shades of Night Descending (1931) and Sun-Table (1935) – that become both distorted and dimensional through assembled panels. Extracts from the artists’ imagination show up elsewhere: a bejeweled pomegranate virtually throbs at the gathered heart of a flou dress; small telephones dangle from earlobes.
