“It’s as if you’re normal on the outside, but nuts inside.” Julien Dossena was talking about a particular look in his fall collection when he said this. Before us was a ginger-y fake fur bourgeois sort of ’60s coat, and a silver-pailletted dress—except the paillettes were also kind of shaggy, and laid on the bias, so they also seemed to mimic the texture of fur, and they were also spilling out onto the coat lapels.
Various kinds of bursting-out effects were all over the collection. Fake fur tails burst out of kilt-like skirts or the bottom of coats. A black dress had an unfurling skirt drape with silver sequins inside it. The tailoring—both coats and jackets—was cut trompe l’oeil, as if you had two on at the same time. There were men as well as women in the show, both modeling various forms of the same double-fronted suits and outerwear.
Dossena said the reasoning behind it was that he wanted to get away from Rabanne chainmail and too much narrative for a season. Instead he worked with “a mix of materials, something really sharp on the outside, and something really splendid or super precious from the inside. To mix them l confront the materials, to do layering in another way.”
The best of his high-contrast texture statements was also the most straightforward: a greenish-brown menswear trouser suit with silver embroidered lapels, worn with a silver sequin turtleneck. There were other looks that didn’t have any explosions going on, like the confetti-print trouser suit and a dress made out of the same thing.
Yet what stood out most was the smothering of fake fur—so much of it. Why are so many designers—Dossena is far from alone—using so much of this synthetic stuff, usually made of non-biodegradable plastic, this season? Is the world going backwards?
