Paco Rabanne

Most designers want their clothes to be worn. Paco Rabanne introduced himself to Paris in 1966 with a collection called "12 Unwearable Dresses in Contemporary Materials," and I think that title tells you everything about his attitude. He wasn't interested in improving on dressmaking. He wanted to replace it.

He was born in the Basque Country in Spain in 1934 and came to France as a child, after his family fled the Spanish Civil War. His mother had worked as a seamstress for Balenciaga. He trained in architecture in Paris, and in the early 1960s he designed accessories, jewellery, and buttons for couture houses. That background shaped everything. When he made clothes, he treated them less as sewn fabric and more as constructed objects, assembled from small hard parts.

The 1966 dresses were made from discs and squares of rigid plastic joined with small metal rings, so they hung from the body like chainmail. There was no thread, no seams in the usual sense, and no fabric at all. He worked with pliers and cutters rather than needles and scissors. Later pieces used aluminium plates, metal links, leather squares, and even paper, and he experimented with moulding garments in one piece. They were noisy, heavy, revealing, and completely new, and they caught the Space Age mood perfectly - more so, in a way, than the cleaner tailored futurism of Courrèges and Cardin, because they really looked as though they'd been built rather than made. Chanel is said to have dismissed him as "not a couturier" but "a metallurgist," which he probably took as a compliment.

His work reached a wide audience through film and performance, including costume work for the 1968 science-fiction film Barbarella, and in 1969 he launched his first perfume, Calandre, which helped pay for the experiments. The chainmail dress became his signature and still defines the house today. I find him one of the most interesting figures of the decade, because he pushed the logic of the space race further than anyone: if fashion was going to be about the future, why should it still be stitched together the way it had been for centuries? The fact that the answer turned out to be "because stitching is comfortable" doesn't make the question any less worth asking.