Paco Rabanne’s Disc-o-Rama Dresses—Now and Then

There’s a reason that Paco Rabanne’s signature link dresses look like body jewels: The Spaniard, a self-described accessoriste, was a jewelry designer before he turned his hand to fashion, and Vogue described his first 1966 collectsion of dresses, made of metal- and thread-linked plastic, as a “flash of double-daring-do.” Scandalously see-through, they were also futuristic. These were clothes for intergalactic warriors and social butterflies: Barbarella wore Rabanne’s metal mesh, while Audrey Hepburn, playing a well-heeled wife in Two for the Road preferred the discs, and Yé-Yé extraordinaire, Françoise Hardy, wore both.

The disc dresses balanced a certain craftiness—one can imagine pulling out a pair of pliers and attempting to put one together—and space-age modernism. Today, Julien Dossena, the house’s creative director, revived these linked marvels in a way that brought them a little bit more down to earth. Not only did he choose to construct them in earthy, mossy tones, but he layered them with pants and toppers that made them able to zoom between night and day with or without Barbarella’s Excessive Machine.