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 streamstress 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.