Two designers have come and gone at Paco Rabanne in the space of two years. Avoiding the retro-futuristic minefield proved no easy task for Manish Arora and Lydia Maurer. Now the job belongs to Julien Dossena: His name is not yet familiar, but he won t remain unknown for long. Dossena launched his own label, Atto, with design partner Lion Blau earlier this year, and the clothes, which had a bit of a mod sixties feel, were scooped up by influential stores.
Today, Dossena demonstrated an understanding of the Rabanne codes—name-checking Françoise Hardy and Jane Birkin, using chain mail and Rabanne s signature "moulé Giffo" molded plastic—but he has a light touch. Take that chain mail, for instance. The potential for cliché is pretty high, but Dossena made it look modern by layering sporty unzipped tank dresses on top. It s a bit tougher to make the shiny molded plastic feel new and not retro-stiff, but Dossena did his best by cutting the dresses super-short and sending them down the runway on pointy cowboy flats.
Dossena worked at Balenciaga under Nicolas Ghesquière, and from him, perhaps, he learned that it takes more to rebrand a heritage company than updating the archives. It requires new propositions. The sporty dresses at the end of the show were a cool reinterpretation of the seen-it-everywhere bomber jacket. Pink overalls, meanwhile, weren t anything like vintage Rabanne, but they did look like what girls want to wear now. That counts for a lot.
