Julien Dossena will be Jean Paul Gaultier’s next guest couturier

Jean Paul Gaultier has found the next designer for its much-watched guest couturier program: Paco Rabanne creative director Julien Dossena.

In a brief release, the house called the forthcoming collection “a merging of Paco Rabanne and Jean Paul Gaultier’s creative DNA,” which Dossena will unveil during the Fall 2023 couture season, in July 2023. After I spotted Gaultier perched in the front row of Dossena’s terrific surrealist Fall 2023 ready-to-wear show in Paris earlier this month, I and much of the fashion press speculated the role, which has become one of the most anticipated happenings of the couture season, might fall next to the French-born futuristic designer.

“Welcome to the Family Julien Dossena!” the release added.

Dossena will follow the rhapsodically-received show by Haider Ackermann, which drew on the unexpectedly minimalist, technique-obsessive side of Gaultier’s oeuvre. Just what each guest designer will plunder amid the half a century of Gaultier creations has become a bit of a parlour game for fashion fans on Instagram and Twitter, though each of Gaultier’s chosen creatives has always created a heady sense of surprise. Gaultier launched the program after he retired in January 2020; his ready-to-wear is spurred forward by collaborators like Lotta Volkova and Palomo Spain, while his legacy as an “enfant terrible” of fashion is carried forward seasonally by guest designers who have included Sacia’s Chitose Abe, Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing, Y/Project and Diesel’s Glenn Martens, and Ackermann.

In WWD, Dossena revealed that he’s already spent a hefty amount of time trawling through the Gaultier archives. “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 realised with the most exquisite techniques and embroideries,” the designer told the outlet.

Dossena has led Paco Rabanne since 2013, and his style of hard chic, building on Rabanne’s legacy of crafting plastic, chainmail, and metal into minidresses and gowns, has won a cult following. Over the past few years, his star seems to have begun burning ever brighter, and his Fall 2023 collection was one of the most talked about at Paris this past season. He’s also not quite a stranger to couture; as he told me in an interview earlier this month, he and his team assemble many of their pieces by hand, working in a realm of demi-couture. “There is a sewing machine for sure, because there are some pieces in fabric too. But a lot of it is like, basically there is no machine. It’s really by hand most of the time. It’s really a craftsmanship that is, let’s say, inherent to the house. There are a lot of people here opening the rings and putting the elements together and engineering.”

This piece originally appeared in Harper's Bazaar US