Julien Dossena Discusses Paco Rabanne’s New Direct-to-Consumer Strategy

Julien Dossena’s Paco Rabanne collections manage to be at once disruptive and wholly wearable, filled with the sorts of pieces that can send an electric shiver up the spine of a woman who needs those logoed pants or must have that chain-link flirty dress right now. How exciting, then, that Paco Rabanne will offer four ready-to-wear looks from its upcoming Fall 2016 collection for purchase directly after its runway show in Paris on March 3. The items will be stocked in the brand’s just-opened Rue Cambon store and on its e-commerce site that day, arriving in Barneys New York locations later in March.

“I had been thinking about this for a long time now, as everyone is questioning the calendar and the reasoning behind the collections,” Dossena told Vogue.com over the phone from his Paris studio. “We weren’t able to do this before because we didn’t have a store, but now that we have retail, we can really control and distribute the clothes in the e-shop and in the proper shop in Paris. I am very enthusiastic to work in these different areas because we are super free in this brand to build and to grow, so it’s interesting to test and try to propose to the customers and to the industry what we think is relevant in fashion today.”

Dossena calls the four shoppable looks the “backbone” of his upcoming collection. Among the pieces offered will be a coat, some knitwear, and evening items in silk with embroideries, all together intended to give shoppers a full sampling of the new direction Dossena is proposing for Fall. “This season is a new mood. We are always trying to explore the different sides of what Paco Rabanne could be because it’s a really multifaceted brand, so this season we’re exploring new categories of clothes that we didn’t have before, like fur and embroideries,” he said. “It’s a little bit of another side of luxury for Paco Rabanne this season—but still in a grunge way!”

The buy-it-now pieces will be revealed the day before the show in photographs by Patrick Demarchelier, styled by Marie-Amélie Sauvé, that will appear as posters on Paris’s bus stations and newsstands and also on the brand’s digital channels. “Paco Rabanne is a house that has a history of being mainstream and having a direct effect on people, so it’s really a perfect house to work in this way,” Dossena said. And though he admitted that some of his creations might go over the heads of the everyday shopper—those knit one-piece rompers will come to mind—the simple introduction to the brand can be enough. “Even if the crowds that are in the street don’t know exactly what we are doing, because we are still quite, edgy, let’s say, in the fashion system, I really want to propose images of the brand to the people on the streets who could say, ‘It’s on Rue Cambon; I’m going to have a look in the shop to see.’ ”

 

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