EXCLUSIVE: Julien Dossena Is Embracing ‘Freedom’ at Jean Paul Gaultier
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“A succession of wows, constant astonishment” is how Julien Dossena described the hours spent trawling through the Jean Paul Gaultier archive in preparation for his role as guest couturier at the house next July.
“It brought back memories, it brought back sensations,” said the designer, who first learned about the “enfant terrible” of Paris fashion as a child growing up in Brittany, having stumbled across a television program about Gauliter.
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“When you are touching all those pieces, you can try to understand the thinking that allowed him to arrive at that exact reference, mixed with another reference that makes it unique and at the same time super French, mixed with that cool, 1990s grunge feeling — yet realized with the most exquisite techniques and embroideries,” he marveled. “You realize that’s what makes him one of the greatest couturiers and designers of his time.”
Suffice it to say that Dossena is approaching this extracurricular project with gusto, reverence — and the same meticulous approach he has plied at Paco Rabanne, where he has been creative director since 2013.
In an exclusive interview at the Jean Paul Gaultier couture salon last week, Dossena said he plans to take in a broad sweep of the designer’s long fashion career, striving to make his one-off couture collection for fall 2023 as rich and “generous” as Gaultier’s legacy.
He cited a particular fascination with the ’90s, a fecund decade for indie fashion designers in Paris, and affection for Gaultier’s controversial “Chic Rabbis” collection exalting the beauty of Orthodox Jewish apparel, and his “Russian Constructivist” effort for fall 1986.
“He worked on so many things that I feel connected to, so I really had to go through an editing process in my brain,” he said. “But I also wanted to embrace that free way of working that he has.”
The designer said his other challenge would be to embrace the precision and occasional flamboyance of couture techniques without “losing the cool of it — the easiness and effortlessness that I think is really evocative of Gaultier’s work.”
He hinted that his runway show during Paris Couture Week, which runs from July 3 to 6, would approximate the intimacy of Gaultier’s earliest shows in the Galerie Vivienne, when the clothes nearly brushed the knees of the spectators lining that narrow covered shopping passage.
Dossena noted that Gaultier has figured prominently throughout his fashion career, with that initial discovery of the designer on television opening his eyes to the possibility of such a job, and an outlet for his sketching proclivities.
He became a fan as a high-school student into trance music, tracking down a pair of raw denim Gaultier jeans and a mesh shirt in a “tribal” print for clubbing.
Once he became a fashion student at La Cambre in Brussels, Dossena religiously tracked Gaultier’s latest collections on Style.com. “He became a figure I was always looking at because of his curiosity and research,” said Dossena, dressed in a black T-shirt and loose trousers.
His first design job out of school, from 2008 to 2012, was in the Balenciaga studio in Paris, where he worked closely with its then-creative director Nicolas Ghesquière, himself an alum of Jean Paul Gaultier.
Dossena said he detected in Ghesquière a similar zeal for newness via a “constant exploration” of what’s possible in fashion.
“Let’s say the best quality for a designer is to always put yourself in danger for the sake of curiosity and excitement,” he said, lauding the freedom, variety and sense of playfulness inherent in Gaultier’s best work.
“Gaultier has a really strong style — you can tell right away when it’s a Gaultier,” he enthused. “And at the same time, there’s that never-ending research and curiosity on different themes or techniques — it could be historic or super modern and technological; it could be pop or noble with an amazing cut.”
Consequently, Dossena said he was “genuinely excited” when he was invited to become the fifth guest couturier at Jean Paul Gaultier, following Haider Ackermann, Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing, Glenn Martens of Y/Project and Diesel, and Chitose Abe of Sacai. “Of course, I’m taking it really seriously because I love his work and his personality so much.”
Following his retirement from the runway in 2020, Gaultier came up with the idea of the couture house inviting different designers to interpret his vast and eclectic oeuvre, achieved over a career spanning 50 years. It’s quickly become a highlight of couture week — and fueled interest in Gaultier’s contributions to the fashion and pop culture.
WWD broke the news on March 2 that Gaultier’s next invitee was being recruited from within the Puig fashion family: Both Paco Rabanne and Jean Paul Gaultier are owned by the Spanish fashion and fragrance group.
“Julien has a particular sense of reinterpretation, and I’m curious to see how he will play with my codes,” Gaultier told WWD. “Paco Rabanne’s heritage is extremely rich, and Julien knows how to make this strength resonate in his collections.”
Dossena is still in the early stages of realizing the Jean Paul Gaultier couture collection, and focused largely on developing fabrics, launching embroideries and testing some initial shape ideas.
But he was already marveling at the capabilities of the couture atelier “with amazing hands and a team that can go really far in explorations of what’s possible. It’s like you’re driving a Rolls-Royce,” he said.
Asked if he might include some designs for men, as previous guest couturiers have, Dossena noted that he likely would as Gaultier “basically invented that gender-fluid thing that we are talking about, without even theorizing it. For him, it was a playfulness and freedom of expression he wanted to express genuinely.
“In his casting, in his teams, he was always giving people a chance to express their uniqueness — and those questions are really at the core of our reflection right now in fashion,” he added.
He marveled that Gaultier did not treat his couture creations as precious objects, often recycling couture dresses into different designs — so a gown might become a dress, and later a skirt and a bra.
“In a super nice way, I was surprised and amazed that nothing was sacred. A piece could be reworked and reworked and repurposed in a different way just because he wanted to update it or improve it,” he said. “I really want to find that balance, that tension between that preciousness and that exquisite attention that you can put into a couture garment, and at the same time to propose something that feels now.”
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