Courrèges (Q1921)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
French fashion house
- Courreges
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Courrèges |
French fashion house |
|
Statements
2020
artistic director
1961
designed for
The Courrèges invitation was a metal Möbius strip, and its infinite-loop nature provided a clue about Nicolas Di Felice’s designs for spring. Where many of the skin-baring looks appeared to be two pieces—a tank dress worn with a bandeau bra, say—they were in fact one. He achieved this particular item by designing the halter-style dress with a neck hole topped by a horizontal strap: Slip your head in, and stretch that strap around the chest—there are snaps at the side—et voilàa.“In the period that we live in, it’s always a comeback to something else—and I’m not talking only about fashion—so I decided we’re going to work on cycles and repetition,” he said at a studio preview. “The Möbius ribbon expresses it really well: A simple piece of paper becomes something where there’s no beginning or end—no inside, no outside.”If that sounds complicated, there was nothing conceptual or contrived about the outcome. Di Felice pointed to an archival cape in duchesse satin from André Courrèges’s winter 1962 show as the launchpad for this exercise, but the collection was sexy in a way that he’s made his own: young, confident, party-ready, both hot and cool.Expanding on the Möbius-strip idea, Di Felice created trousers with an additional piece of fabric extending from the outer seam of one leg then crossing between the legs to connect behind the other one on the outer seam. I can’t remember ever seeing something like the half-pant, half-skirt hybrid results on the runway. Also on theme was a wisp of a dress that, when laid flat, was a circle with a smaller circle for an armhole. Twisted around the body with the help of some light boning—yes, like a Möbius—it’s precisely the kind of thing young women want to wear out to the club.Di Felice’s summer residency at Jean Paul Gaultier, where he guest designed a couture collection, has raised his profile. There were screaming fans by the hundreds outside today waiting for Wooyoung from the South Korean boy band Ateez. It also might’ve boosted his ambition. Originally, he wanted to do 40 of the same looks. “But,” he said, “I thought it might be a bit too cynical for me. It’s not really me to be cynical.” Instead, he worked in a cycle, evolving his modern version of that 1962 cape: His comes with an exaggerated hood, into a coat with a martingale in back, into that halter dress with a bandeau, and so on. In a less skilled designer’s hands, the repetition built into the process could’ve proved boring.
The opposite was true here: It was a CV for everything Di Felice can do—from sexy clubwear all the way up to the hautest of couture shapes.
25 September 2024
Sometimes the best ideas spring from the simplest of sources. So too do the best collections, like Nicolas Di Felice’s terrific men’s and women’s resort for Courrèges, which he showed via a presentation in the Marais neighborhood in Paris. (Just to add to his workload, he also opened the maison’s newest boutique in the same ‘hood, on Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, the very same day.) “I’ve always looked around me before starting a collection,” Di Felice said via Zoom one recent afternoon, “and March here in Paris was recorded as being one of the greatest months without sun. To be honest with you, it hasn’t changed much because we’re in June and it’s still raining and pretty dark outside! Lots of us are talking about escape: We need sun, we need vacation.” (It’s safe to say that that simple and direct statement speaks for us all.)Di Felice is already planning his holidays, and intends to spend some of those glorious, traditional French summergrandes vacancesof weeks and weeksandweeks off—envious, me?—by revisiting the Greek island of Amorgos, where he will hike the coastal trails in sports shorts and scuba sneakers. And in the way a designer’s mind can alight on connections like a stone skimming across the Aegean waters, that’s where this season really started. “As I was organizing my summer, I thought, OK, I would like to put the details of the construction of what I usually wear then,” he said, “but I didn’t want to do sporty clothes at the end of the day.”It’s a testament to Di Felice’s skills as a designer—and considerable they are—that he can make magic out of the prosaic and deliver an ineffable cool, all the while filtering it through one of the Parisian fashion houses with the most singular of images burned into our collective consciousness; which is to say, one that’s minimal, graphic, and tinged with a space age-y futurism that looks quaintly of the past these days but which Di Felice has brought roaring back to relevance. While this collection drew in part from a series of illustrations of a Courrèges summer 1970 collection of groovy cut-out tunics and banded detailing on short dresses—“sometimes I like drawings more than the actual pieces,” he said—he’s not a nostalgia-ist.
20 June 2024
Sometimes the best ideas spring from the simplest of sources. So too do the best collections, like Nicolas Di Felice’s terrific men’s and women’s resort for Courrèges, which he showed via a presentation in the Marais neighborhood in Paris. (Just to add to his workload, he also opened the maison’s newest boutique in the same ‘hood, on Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, the very same day.) “I’ve always looked around me before starting a collection,” Di Felice said via Zoom one recent afternoon, “and March here in Paris was recorded as being one of the greatest months without sun. To be honest with you, it hasn’t changed much because we’re in June and it’s still raining and pretty dark outside! Lots of us are talking about escape: We need sun, we need vacation.” (It’s safe to say that that simple and direct statement speaks for us all.)Di Felice is already planning his holidays, and intends to spend some of those glorious, traditional French summergrandes vacancesof weeks and weeksandweeks off—envious, me?—by revisiting the Greek island of Amorgos, where he will hike the coastal trails in sports shorts and scuba sneakers. And in the way a designer’s mind can alight on connections like a stone skimming across the Aegean waters, that’s where this season really started. “As I was organizing my summer, I thought, OK, I would like to put the details of the construction of what I usually wear then,” he said, “but I didn’t want to do sporty clothes at the end of the day.”It’s a testament to Di Felice’s skills as a designer—and considerable they are—that he can make magic out of the prosaic and deliver an ineffable cool, all the while filtering it through one of the Parisian fashion houses with the most singular of images burned into our collective consciousness; which is to say, one that’s minimal, graphic, and tinged with a space age-y futurism that looks quaintly of the past these days but which Di Felice has brought roaring back to relevance. While this collection drew in part from a series of illustrations of a Courrèges summer 1970 collection of groovy cut-out tunics and banded detailing on short dresses—“sometimes I like drawings more than the actual pieces,” he said—he’s not a nostalgia-ist.
20 June 2024
Between the sound of a woman’s breathing, a white, tensile installation that responded, swelled, rose and fell with it, and the slits of the low center-front pockets which every model had one hand tucked into—well! Nicolas di Felice was so clearly talking about the pleasures of sex and fashion at his Courrèges show that his audience was left open-mouthed. “I wanted to work around intimacy,” the designer said. “Something sensual and sensitive. Trying to reconnect with emotion, in a way.”It stimulated a lot of hilarity amongst female observers afterwards over how to name the masturbatory pocket-action. Google supplied some semantic starters. Should it be Le Frig or Le Shlick? In the old days—the 1960s, when André Courrèges was causing a Space Age youth revolution—there were haircuts and dances that were named things like that. The difference with Di Felice is that his frank way of transmitting eroticism wasn’t a retro gimmick at all. With the exception of a single instance of breast-visibility, all of the looks managed to be covered up, yet eloquently perverse at the same time.“Wrapping, enveloping you for protection” was the way Di Felice put it. “It’s simple: I started with a scarf, wrapping and draping it around the body.” The canon of Courrèges is technically graphic and angular—but also a bit weird, when selectively viewed through Di Felice’s 21st century eyes. He had Courrèges’s space-balaclavas on his inspiration board—a short way from an image from the 1980s London underground latex fetish club Atomage. A black PVC-bound transparent tank, with two small pockets to cover nipples, had been brought up from the archive, circa 1966. It looked as fresh as today. “What do you want to expose or conceal?” Di Felice asked, rhetorically, holding it aloft in the studio.The subject of ‘naked dressing’ as applied to the female body is a controversy du jour. History should note that at this juncture, it was young women designers who first brought it up again: Nensi Dojaka, Charlotte Knowles, Karoline Vitto, Michaela Stark et al. They own this one. Wisely, Di Felice didn’t jump on that obvious runaway fashion-trend bandwagon. What he’s owning at Courrèges is his slyly-coded slant on Parisian sexual chic.
Pockets aside, the difference is in the discipline he applies to the scarf-derived wrap-and-buckle detail of trench coats and leather jacket collars, to ‘Blindfold’ sunglasses, to slick, stretch thigh-boots and shoes made of body contouring corn-starch latex-substitute. Yes, he cuts a mean party dress—this season’s spiraling cuts give the wearer options to expose this or that, by taking off a sleeve wrapping it over her shoulder, baring her flank or back; whatever.But the really great thing about Di Felice is the way he’s methodically dedicated himself to building a real wardrobe, and a community, and a sensation around Courrèges. His “Frisson” embroideries—upstanding feathers on dresses and tops—communicated exactly the chill and thrill of feeling something amazing in the moment.The desire for that thrill-seeking is a primary motive that’s always brought people to spectate on the arena of Paris Fashion Week. For a designer (or creative director, as we must call them these days) there’s no prescription for meeting that high expectation. All you need is to be purely yourself, to execute something technically excellent, and—when you’re really flying—capture something of the zeitgeist while you’re at it. Nicolas Di Felice is one of the few who’s attaining all of that.
28 February 2024
A lot of soul-searching has been going on among designers since the last round of Paris shows ended in the first week of October 2023. “I really had to think when I started designing this collection. The social and political context was really not inspiring, and pretty sad,” said Nicolas Di Felice. “I thought, ‘Okay, what do you want, what do you need, now?’ It was, ‘I just want to be in the arms of someone.’ So I’m working on human touch; human connection. A bit more sensuality, even sexuality.”That’s, for a start, how he came up with the placement of a pocket, just above the pubis, in this Courrèges pre-collection. Frank sexuality, filtered through a minimalist, modernist design logic is very much Di Felice’s thing. The fact that he can turn it into everyday wear—not only for club encounters—is one of the secrets of his burgeoning success in reviving this brand, and firing up its relevance for 2020s shoppers.Amongst the references in this collection wereQuerelle, the classic homoerotic Fassbinder movie in which the eponymous protagonist is a Belgian sailor. (Di Felice happens to be Belgian.) Cue: the appearance of a wide-leg sailor-pant silhouette from the beginning of his men’s lookbook. Fluid, wide leg trousers are fashionable right now: QED.Was Andre Courrèges’s work kinky? Depends who’s looking. Di Felice made a mental connection between the space-age couture helmets and vinyl Courrèges presented in the 1960s and gimp masks and fetish wear. There were some balaclava hood-type looks and (as always) many iterations of the signature black vinyl throughout the menswear and the women’s collections. Pieces were strategically slashed and suggestively zippered.What’s for certain is that one thing will lead to another. Di Felice typically starts his ideas for the season ahead in his pre-collections. We’ll be seeing more of these concepts just around the corner in February.
19 January 2024
A lot of soul-searching has been going on among designers since the last round of Paris shows ended in the first week of October 2023. “I really had to think when I started designing this collection. The social and political context was really not inspiring, and pretty sad,” said Nicolas Di Felice. “I thought, ‘Okay, what do you want, what do you need, now?’ It was, ‘I just want to be in the arms of someone.’ So I’m working on human touch; human connection. A bit more sensuality, even sexuality.”That’s, for a start, how he came up with the placement of a pocket, just above the pubis, in this Courrèges pre-collection. Frank sexuality, filtered through a minimalist, modernist design logic is very much Di Felice’s thing. The fact that he can turn it into everyday wear—not only for club encounters—is one of the secrets of his burgeoning success in reviving this brand, and firing up its relevance for 2020s shoppers.Amongst the references in this collection wereQuerelle, the classic homoerotic Fassbinder movie in which the eponymous protagonist is a Belgian sailor. (Di Felice happens to be Belgian.) Cue: the appearance of a wide-leg sailor-pant silhouette from the beginning of his men’s lookbook. Fluid, wide leg trousers are fashionable right now: QED.Was Andre Courrèges’s work kinky? Depends who’s looking. Di Felice made a mental connection between the space-age couture helmets and vinyl Courrèges presented in the 1960s and gimp masks and fetish wear. There were some balaclava hood-type looks and (as always) many iterations of the signature black vinyl throughout the menswear and the women’s collections. Pieces were strategically slashed and suggestively zippered.What’s for certain is that one thing will lead to another. Di Felice typically starts his ideas for the season ahead in his pre-collections. We’ll be seeing more of these concepts just around the corner in February.
19 January 2024
Whatever the X-factor may be that enables a designer to electrify a heritage house with something that’s both true to their identity and crackling with zeitgeist-leading fashion energy, Nicolas Di Felice is channeling that rare super-power at Courrèges. Few designers today have the conciseness and clarity to work new silhouettes the way he does. Fewer still know how to purpose his level of Parisian sophistication to encompass a worldview that’s as young, sexy, and democratically-focused as his.‘Simplicity’ has been a watchword at this round of shows. Di Felice’s black and white collection sort-of fell into that category only for the fact that he’d started by taking oversized school uniform generics—shirts, white tees, polo shirts, a Harrington jacket—and reconstructed and twisted them into leggy, asymmetrical shapes. “I’m always talking about being practical and technical when it comes to making clothes—that’s what I do every day,” he began by explanation. “But at the beginning of the season I start to set the universe, the story. This time it was like that feeling of the last day of school before you go off for summer. So at the beginning of the show, it’s the archetypes of varsity and college things because we’re still on campus.”He claimed the construction of these short, casually torqued looks was “really easy to do.” Well, maybe if you’re that fluent as a designer, it might be. But Di Felice has been practicing, developing his ideas for Courrèges for three years now, vibing off the founder’s modernist space-age ’60s and ’70s archive and melding in his own rave-biker memories and sensibilities to huge success.His sense of styling—how items break down and fit together—is a great part of that. Take his ‘elliptical’ skirts and diagonally-slashed biker flares, again a deceptively simple merge of Di Felice and and André Courrèges’s geometric design methods. “Everything comes from the shape of the circle, the ellipse, which is really cool, and quite André, I’d say,” Di Felice offered.He cut a mean, long-stemmed fitted tailored coat with fluted sleeves and a buckled neckline: minimal French chic, epitomized. Later, the show tended towards a look of tunics over pants—part Courrèges, part ’90s, maybe, yet completely fresh and directional. Geographically, spiritually, Di Felice had a particular destination on his mind. His tribe of school-escapees were off to the desert, to join some sort of camp—maybe a cult of believers in astral travel, aliens or whatnot.
A couple had 3D-printed bras; others artfully slashed, harnessed ‘naked’ dresses.Then, funnily enough, the ground literally did move. As the models stalked the perimeter of a flat, sand-and-plaster quadrangle—Di Felice’s ‘desert’—the surface began to pop and crack before our eyes. A seismic fashion happening? If there’s a quake of significant talent on the way, Di Felice is clearly in its vanguard.
27 September 2023
What’s interesting about André Courrèges’s work is its slight perversity. It’s often been left unexplored, but Courrèges’s intrinsic oddness is something that Nicolas di Felice has embraced wholly. Take as an example this season’s heeled sandal, a commercial reinterpretation of a shoe (well, object) that di Felice pulled from the archive. The archival piece in question is a sandal cut from a single sheet of metal. It’s completely unwearable, but that’s the point—see? Strange!The Courrèges show last season started with models hunched over cellphones, only to end with them “finding” their inner light with the help of spotlights and chrome pendant jewelry. “There was a quest for exiting the city and for hedonism,” he said at a showroom appointment. “It’s something we certainly went for this season and something you will see in the show in September.”Di Felice rewatchedZabriskie Point, Michelangelo Antonini’s 1970s deep cut, as he started this lineup. He had stills from the film printed, which showed the western U.S. landscapes captured in the film, together with its freewheeling characters. “It touched me, because they’re fighting for a certain cause and for their rights, and then they leave to live in exile in a really beautiful and very dry desert. I simply imagined the possibility of an endless summer,” he said.The inspiration merged nicely with di Felice’s interpretation of archival styles. He started with tailoring, with an impactful and sharp one-shoulder silhouette and an alluring askew vested one-piece. As the story continued, these pieces came undone. Put-together pinstripes (continuing from fall) were twisted and shirred, and an otherwise covered-up jacket was slashed through the torso to expose a nipple (perverse!). “Here they are transforming what they have once they arrived to the desert,” di Felice said. His characters are making due with what they have on their backs.More naughtiness followed. The black rib sleeve finish on varsity logo tees broke off into a leather strap on one side (“very [Robert] Mapplethrope”), and di Felice’s boot-cut jeans went wider and flared. Most inventive and impactful were dresses and skirts fashioned from circles draped around the body to resemble the Courrèges logo, and the closing look, a men’s singlet (this season’s reinvention of the tank top) in a completely sheer rainbow-like print. It looked as if a golden hour rainbow was shining on the model’s torso—“we call it the aura,” di Felice said.
These details are the nuances that make di Felice’s Courrèges stand out across a sea of brand reinvigorations. He’s building a counterculture of his own here by leaning into uninhibited fun and sensuality. After all, what is countercultural in today’s self-serious atmosphere if not pursuing one’s own pleasures? “In the end it’s about desire,” di Felice said. “You want it and you go and get it.”
22 June 2023
What’s interesting about André Courrèges’s work is its slight perversity. It’s often been left unexplored, but Courrèges’s intrinsic oddness is something that Nicolas di Felice has embraced wholly. Take as an example this season’s heeled sandal, a commercial reinterpretation of a shoe (well, object) that di Felice pulled from the archive. The archival piece in question is a sandal cut from a single sheet of metal. It’s completely unwearable, but that’s the point—see? Strange!The Courrèges show last season started with models hunched over cellphones, only to end with them “finding” their inner light with the help of spotlights and chrome pendant jewelry. “There was a quest for exiting the city and for hedonism,” he said at a showroom appointment. “It’s something we certainly went for this season and something you will see in the show in September.”Di Felice rewatchedZabriskie Point, Michelangelo Antonini’s 1970s deep cut, as he started this lineup. He had stills from the film printed, which showed the western U.S. landscapes captured in the film, together with its freewheeling characters. “It touched me, because they’re fighting for a certain cause and for their rights, and then they leave to live in exile in a really beautiful and very dry desert. I simply imagined the possibility of an endless summer,” he said.The inspiration merged nicely with di Felice’s interpretation of archival styles. He started with tailoring, with an impactful and sharp one-shoulder silhouette and an alluring askew vested one-piece. As the story continued, these pieces came undone. Put-together pinstripes (continuing from fall) were twisted and shirred, and an otherwise covered-up jacket was slashed through the torso to expose a nipple (perverse!). “Here they are transforming what they have once they arrived to the desert,” di Felice said. His characters are making due with what they have on their backs.More naughtiness followed. The black rib sleeve finish on varsity logo tees broke off into a leather strap on one side (“very [Robert] Mapplethrope”), and di Felice’s boot-cut jeans went wider and flared. Most inventive and impactful were dresses and skirts fashioned from circles draped around the body to resemble the Courrèges logo, and the closing look, a men’s singlet (this season’s reinvention of the tank top) in a completely sheer rainbow-like print. It looked as if a golden hour rainbow was shining on the model’s torso—“we call it the aura,” di Felice said.
These details are the nuances that make di Felice’s Courrèges stand out across a sea of brand reinvigorations. He’s building a counterculture of his own here by leaning into uninhibited fun and sensuality. After all, what is countercultural in today’s self-serious atmosphere if not pursuing one’s own pleasures? “In the end it’s about desire,” di Felice said. “You want it and you go and get it.”
22 June 2023
Emerging from the fog, the first model at Courrèges stared down at the phone in her hands, her face lit up by its LED screen. Nicolas di Felice has been thinking about all the time that we spend on our devices. The hoodie the model wore was hunched forward, its volume sort of flattened, and di Felice cut armhole slits into the front, for easier access. There was a leather motorcycle jacket, a tweed coat, and a vinyl caban cut the same way.Di Felice is on his phone as much as the next guy, he admitted. But watching his friends text when they’re sitting at opposite ends of a bar on a night out, rather than walking over to each other for a chat, he realized that our pocket-sized computers are changing more than our postures, they’re changing our lives. “I don’t judge,” he said, “but I question it, and I wanted to try to reflect on it. To help him do so, a Siri-like AI voice on the soundtrack kept asking, “Is the sky blue? Is the sky blue?” If you open your weather app in the morning instead of looking out the window, she was talking to you.There’s a lot of heat around Courrèges. Di Felice excels at the kind of body-baring clothes young women today respond to. Last season looked like the morning after a long night at Burning Man, the girls carrying their sandals in their hands; this season, they’re headed to the office on the metro, in shades of black and gray, and even pinstripes, although in nothing as conventional as your standard pantsuit. Tunics with huge circular pendants suspended from portholes on the chest replaced jackets. They were cut in the same general proportions as the ’60s-ish A-line shifts that followed them.As the show progressed, the black and gray gave way to red and pink, and the straight lines to soft, sexy drapes suspended from wire necklaces, including one or two with the house logo, the collection’s single off note. The final series of dresses came in silver or iridescent sequins accessorized by those mirrored pendants, right over the solar plexus. With the help of a spotlight, it looked like they were emanating energy, the phone’s LED replaced in the end by inner light. “The sky is blue,” the AI voice finally concluded. “Do you see me? I see you.”
1 March 2023