Big sky thinking: Paco Rabanne’s Julien Dossena
JULIEN DOSSENA HAS TURNED PACO RABANNE INTO ONE OF THE COOLEST LABELS IN PARIS, WITH A BOLDLY OPTIMISTIC SPIN ON GLAMOUR AND A REFRESHINGLY BRIGHT OUTLOOK ON LIFE
julien dossena epitomises that very modern, zeitgeisty idea of manifestation. He’s not a religious man, yet he speaks unwaveringly about faith – in himself, humanity, love, the power of life to sort itself out. Dressed in all black, he’s surrounded by white, sitting in his airy, calm, almost zen-like office with its lovely views of Paris’s Avenue Montaigne and beyond, and talking about the role fashion has to play at a particularly fraught time.
‘I see these runway shows that position fashion like an apocalypse with this kind of dystopia thing. We are all having the same feelings. The world can be quite scary. But I’m like, let’s have faith in humans, in the good in humans. You know? We can all together make something quite joyful. We’re not saving the world, but just exploring hope, let’s say…’ his voice trails off.
The tranquillity is the opposite of what I expected. This is Paris’s boy wonder, after all. The 37-year-old with a youthful charm who turned Paco Rabanne, the Parisian maison once loved for its ’60s-era Barbarella futurism (and then later known for its extended period of irrelevance and failed relaunches), into one of the city’s most exciting turnarounds, with a distinctly cool and electric take on glamour. His shows are a hot ticket filled with sexy, directional and
‘I WANT PEOPLE TO AT LEAST FEEL CONFIDENT TO JUST BE THEMSELVES’
yet wholly wearable and covetable clothes. Wardrobing for the night out and the day afterward. The lucky few who make it into a Paco Rabanne show are an influential mix of editors and stylists from the industry’s most respected titles, buzzy influencers and members of his achingly cool network of artist, musician, actor and model friends.
At his spring/summer ’20 show in September, model of the moment Alton Mason – bare-chested in a shearling Paco Rabanne coat embellished with gilded leaves – bopped in his seat, while the singer Kelela sat serenely in crystal fishnets and cowboy boots. A few seats down, model/actor Dree Hemingway, in a Paco Rabanne rocker tee, chatted with friends as a line-up of wilfully optimistic, psychedelic, ’70s-flavoured dresses and tailoring walked the runway. Everyone in the room was someone and, in Julien’s world, there is an iteration of Paco Rabanne for all types, whether you like it on the ‘extra’ end of the scale, coated in silver chain-mail, or low-key, in the form of a beige cashmere roll neck or classic Breton tee. Insiders love to wear it, retailers love to buy it. In short, Julien’s Paco Rabanne is white hot.
But here, in his studio, on a crisp, clear winter day, Julien is all measured, softspoken introspection. I can’t see any signs of the video game-playing, nightclub-traipsing bon viveur I read about. ‘I knew I wanted to be the guy who was there for more than just two years,’ he says. ‘It can be easy to be the hot shot for two years or something. To just fit in one moment with one collection that is everywhere and that you repeat again and again until the press gets bored. You know that is not going to last,’ he adds. So, he says, it’s a chapter of hard work for him, rather than a moment of basking in the spotlight. ‘I spend most of my time here, working and working and, when I come back home, I just crash on the couch and watch something really dumb on, like, Netflix,’ he says. (His current fix is Sex Education.)
The long game, how to play it, how to win it, is a recurring thread during our talk. That’s because Julien is particularly good at it. ‘I grew up in a fishing village. So I didn’t have any prior connections to the fashion world. I had to work hard to get in,’ he says. Home was Le Pouldu, a small village in Brittany, where he aspired to be a marine biologist and developed an obsession with whales. ‘I’d sit and draw whales for hours. I was four or five when I first discovered them
‘MY JOB IS TO PROPOSE SOMETHING RELEVANT IN A WORLD THAT IS REALLY COMPLICATED’
‘WE CAN MAKE SOMETHING JOYFUL. WE’RE NOT SAVING THE WORLD, JUST EXPLORING HOPE’
and liked that they are the biggest animal in the world and yet can go so far down in the ocean where no man can go,’ he says.
He attributes his unflappable sense of possibility to his formative years. ‘The sea provided a place to dream. Its expansiveness gave this idea that you can travel elsewhere. My hometown was just boring enough to allow me to grow the part of myself that aspired to something bigger,’ he says.
His childhood love of drawing turned into a curiosity about fashion through magazines like i-d, Dazed and The Face, inspiring him to eventually study art history at the École Superieure des Arts Appliqués Duperré in Paris, then fashion at La Cambre in Brussels, where he earned a master’s degree. When he set his sights on a design job with Nicolas Ghesquière’s team at Balenciaga, easily one of the industry’s most influential and powerful brands at the time, despite knowing no one there, he never considered his odds. ‘I wrote letters, the old-fashioned way, literally putting my CV in the mail again and again. I knew I could learn something at Balenciaga. That was where I wanted to be. I just always have this feeling that I will make it. I can be quite stubborn like this, for better or worse.’
After turning down job offers from elsewhere, Julien eventually got a call back, and later an internship from which he worked his way up the ranks of Ghesquière’s team alongside peers who have since also become stars, including Natacha Ramsaylevi, now creative director at Chloé. ‘At Balenciaga, I watched and learned. I didn’t make a lot of noise. I’m not that kind of person. I navigated it quietly,’ he says.
He takes a similar approach at Paco Rabanne, where he has pushed the business along a path of steady growth since owner Marc Puig gave a then unknown Julien the top spot, aged 30, in 2014. ‘We were a team of 10 when I arrived, it was really a start-up mentality and we built from there. If you want to build it properly it takes time,’ he says.
In the six years since, he’s introduced Paco Rabanne to a new generation of consumers who were unfamiliar with its Spanish founder’s trademark chain-mail dresses and ’60s obsession with sci-fi. He has also launched menswear and a bridal collection and tripled the brand’s turnover with ready-to-wear that consistently proves that wearability and creativity need not be mutually exclusive. A huge part of the appeal is that his clothes simply make you feel good, like the most exciting version of yourself: a belted leather patchwork trench emblazoned with rays of light and cumulonimbus clouds (that very same big sky thinking from Julien’s childhood in outerwear form, if you will) can have that effect on a woman.
‘At the end of the day, my job is to propose something, at first for women and now for men, that I feel is relevant for them to live in, in a world that is really complicated right now,’ he says. ‘And to help them be as free as they can as they take care of their kids, if they have some, or move through a life doing the things they love. And if they at least feel confident enough to be able to just be themselves, then my mission is fulfilled.’