Paco Rabanne
Fashion house Paco Rabanne has opened its new flagship store on Rue Cambon in Paris.
In the delicate equation between showing and selling, the threshold plays a fundamental role. Hence the design of the first Paco Rabanne shop mediates between total openness and total enclosure. The space thus created is intimate yet accessible and tries to represent an idea of delicacy, technology and luxury without using common places.
Materials are refined but direct and simple. The perimeter - the room in the room - carries all the materiality of the shop and makes its background. As such the intervention hangs between device and spatial correction. Doors, shelves and ‘windows’ organize the view and make the display possible. As a result the space is completely organized through a simple but transformable perimeter wall, a wall that carries within itself the echo of the radical experiments of Paco Rabanne himself, as he executed them directly on the material of clothing. Here, traces of that are found in the perforated aluminum surfaces of the semi cupboards, but indirectly, as if we want to keep the ambiguity into what the future will bring.
The shop consists of two main ‘spatial’ elements: the aluminum perimeter device that organizes the main spaces and the ‘Loos’ space, space that is intricately designed with a contemporary refinement. These spaces could be considered more ‘classical’ yet convey a radically contemporary materiality. If we keep Loos’s adage ‘ how to dress well’ in mind, we can only be convinced it is exactly the dichotomy of the most intimate and most exhibitionist of interventions that is able to translate this most curious of relationships between fashion and space into architecture.