Growing up in a small fishing village in France near the coast of Brittany, Julien Dossena, the 37-year-old creative director of Paco Rabanne, spent hours sketching speedboats, whales, medieval knights and sultry female superheroes. In his late teens, he turned his focus to fashion: “My dad owned a nightclub, and hanging out there, I became obsessed with evening wear — it felt very ‘Boogie Nights,’” he says. “Then I got into skateboarding culture, ’90s streetwear and grunge through magazines like The Face and i-D.” He also discovered the work of Belgian designers, including Martin Margiela and Ann Demeulemeester, whom he found to be “a refreshing antithesis to the uptight and terrifying world of Paris fashion,” and enrolled at La Cambre National Visual Arts School in Brussels. Afterward, in 2008, he landed an internship at Balenciaga, where he eventually became a senior designer. He left the brand in 2012 and started his own line, Atto, and then took a freelance gig at Paco Rabanne, the Paris label that had struggled to find its footing following the retirement of its Basque founder in 1999. Within months, Dossena was running the show.

[Sign up here for the T List newsletter, a weekly roundup of what T Magazine editors are noticing and coveting now.]

As he saw it, his mission at the house, which was established in 1966 and is best known for the space-age metallic bodysuits, sequined skirts and chain-mail minidresses once favored by Jane Birkin and Françoise Hardy, was to think beyond shimmery staples and give women a fully realized wardrobe. At Dossena’s first runway show, for the spring 2014 collection, models wore mock-neck patent-leather dresses and body-conscious cotton overalls, and although there were touches of chain mail and metallics, these were overlaid with mesh or paired with a tailored overcoat or sporty dress. He’s since shown everything from bias-cut, rhinestone-studded kimonos to Victorian prairie dresses done in floral-printed silver lamé — pieces that update the glamour of 1940s Hollywood and 1970s rock. As Dossena, who has lived in Paris since 2007, puts it, “Paco Rabanne used clothes to liberate, and I love that idea. But fashion can only be transcendent if it reflects the world we’re living in right now.”