ARCHIVES EUROPE 1 - When Paco Rabanne reiterated his apocalypse prediction in 1999

Romain Rouillard 4:21 p.m., February 3, 2023

Paco Rabanne was no exception.

Visionary couturier and big name in fashion, the Franco-Spanish, who died this Friday in Brittany at the age of 88, did not hesitate to hit the headlines through extravagant declarations.

His most memorable output will certainly remain his prediction of the apocalypse in 1999 through a book dubbed 

.

Based on the writings of Nostradamus and on a "vision" he would have had from the age of 17, he assured that the Russian space station Mir would crash on Paris as well as in the Gers on the occasion of the total eclipse of the sun which was to occur on August 11 of that year. 

Faced with this absurd prediction, the Gers General Council had even decided to take the couturier to court.

Not enough to impress the interested party who, at the microphone of Europe 1 in June 1999, renewed his remarks.

"Listen to the information from the radios. And if you are told that on such a day at such a time the Mir station will fall into the Pacific, do not believe it and go away from Paris", he said. 

"I receive a hundred letters a day but no insulting letters"

And to continue by justifying his statements: "It was not me who invented this. It has been in the writings of Monsieur de Notre Dame for 500 years. They say that fire from heaven will fall on these cities. And I want tell the people of the Gers that I love this region. Gascony, I go there often, it's the best cuisine in the world. So I will go back there after these events but certainly not in August. I am not suicidal when even". 

>>

- End of the world: the great humbug

On Europe 1, the couturier nevertheless recognized the damage that his grandiloquent writings had caused him.

"In my company, they are unhappy, furious. They say that I am harming society".

But he also assured that his book had not triggered the announced outcry.

"Since I wrote this book, which is very controversial, I receive a hundred letters a day but no insulting letters. People tell me that I have a lot of courage to say that."

A public apology in October 1999

Paco Rabanne had also summoned the memory of the radioactive cloud of Chernobyl to justify his strange story.

"Everyone slapped their thighs laughing at the time saying that the Chernobyl cloud would not return to France," he said.

"In the same way that Belgian dioxin chicken should not come to France... It's part of the same disinformation system." 

On Europe 1, the fashion icon nevertheless promised to make "amendment" if his prophecy never happened.

"I hope I'm wrong," he also breathed.

Something promised, something due since in October 1999, two months after the disaster which was to reduce Paris to ashes, he addressed his mea culpa in the columns of

.

"I have lived since August 11 with the feeling of having done an excessive thing and I receive payment for it (...) I have publicly asked forgiveness for those whom I have misled. And I say, I say again, that I regret it. And that I will always regret it".