Brightness, sun-drenched pastels, sparkle, decoration, prints! When there’s so much going on with all the changes at fashion houses—let alone the doom of newsfeeds—Julien Dossena turned out to be sticking to the wisest resolve for a creative director: You do you.
After cheering everyone up with girls in funny metallic palm-fringed shoes swinging around in his swim-meets-couture collection, he had this to say: “In a time that’s really complicated, you can’t avoid the tension. But at the same time, you just really want to have that floating, sunny feeling around.”
So true: Looking at many shows right now, it seems it’s slipped a lot of designers’ minds that they’re actually projecting into spring and summer next year. Not Dossena—he was brought up on the coast of Brittany and “I got my diving proficiency certificate, and everything!” he said. “I loved diving into that beautiful peaceful underwater world.” Hence what went on here, from the amazing 1960s scuba mask plastic-rimmed mirrored sunglasses to the rubber-daisy and palm leaf-sprouting shoes.
“At first I discovered swimming costumes from the ’50s and ’40s and they were like built like couture dresses,” he said, and you could completely get how the collection was engineered from there. “I really wanted to have fun with this kind of femininity and explode it,” he added. Using a palette of pastels he described as “Miami Design District, or something,” he set about constructing flippy flounced skirts, nutty bras mimicking the shape of cartoony leaves, mixing 1950s florals with Liberty prints, and stoning everything with crystal embroidery.
What sounds like a cacophony of color was actually highly controlled. Dossena is a precise and skilled designer, engineering such interesting ideas as open-sided chiffon skirts with patterned swim shorts underneath, or the great-looking idea of capri leggings topped with asymmetric swags like a detail from some ’40s cocktail dress—finished with jaunty flower brooches on the hip.
Those with a long memory might recall the radical spring 2003 scuba collection—with Hawaiian prints gone sporty—that Nicolas Ghesquière put out to revolutionary effect when he was at Balenciaga. Funnily enough, Ghesquière was in the front row today, too. Dossena’s take was a lot more girly, and inflected with a lot more metallics—conceptual chrome leis,“car- crash” crushed metal underskirts and suchlike. This is the house founded by the uber-futurist Paco Rabanne, home of conceptual metallics, after all. Dossena has moved his Rabanne a long way from those roots, but the summer excursion he took us on was a lot of fun.
