admin It’s been a big year for Julien Dossena, who’s celebrating 10 years as creative director at Paco Rabanne in 2023. When he arrived a decade ago, the once radical and highly influential house was languishing. No one knew how to make its rich-yet-specific DNA—Space Age chain mail—relevant for a modern woman. With a slow and steady burn, Dossena achieved the winning formula, manipulating the house codes with a mix of sharp tailoring, sportiness, French bohemian femininity, and a take on chainmail that was sexy and experimental, but also manageable. Not an easy feat.
In June, Paco Rabanne’s parent company Puig announced an ambitious rebrand strategy unifying the ready-to-wear and significant beauty businesses, including a host of best-selling fragrances and a new makeup collection, under one label—Rabanne. Under Dossena’s direction, Rabanne is close to becoming a $1 billion business. In July, Dossena showed his collection as the guest designer for Jean Paul Gaultier’s couture program, an experience that bordered on the sacred for Dossena, who has idolized Gaultier since he was a kid.
For spring 2024, Dossena channeled this momentum into a collection that drew on the mystical side of Paco Rabanne. The designer, who passed away in February at the age of 88, was famous for his devotion to magic, astrology, and the occult. Dossena’s woman was sensual, time-traveling, and otherworldly—cloaked in ’70s sarouel pants, folded scarf tops, and hoods and draped skirts, much of it lavishly embellished with geometric metallic embroidery, metal fringe, and beading. The silhouettes were exotic and hypnotic, in a palette of romantic desert sunset and metallic tones, dripping with geometric medallions and peacock feathers.
Dossena said he wanted to play with a sense of traversing time. “You never know if it’s ancient or if it’s from the future,” he said backstage. “Sometimes people are going to see sci-fi in it, sometimes Dune, sometimes they’re going to see classic Louvre or Greek statues.” To that end, he and his team photographed statues and their draped garments at the Louvre to develop ombré prints of pleats and folds that appeared on metal mesh skirts. Jean Clemmer’s 1960s photographs of women—nude except for their Rabanne-esque metallic jewelry, smiling and basking in the sun—were used as prints on tank tops layered with swishy draped goddess dresses and skirts.
It all amounted to a fantasy wardrobe of exquisite pieces realized by painstaking handcraft. Rabanne’s house mystique may be steeped in the futuristic (Dossena himself is a devoted gamer; The Last of Us is his personal favorite) but he is of the firm belief that luxury today is defined by human touch. As he said, “Luxury means you are wearing something that has been done by a team of human skills. They learned to make that.”
