Nicolas di Felice is gathering a community around Courrèges, and that’s quite something, considering he’s been there just over a year. His last show in September—held in a field where he once went to a festival—showed which way things were going: glam, slick, sexy, and with lots of applause from French fashion friends. But it was the after-party on that night, held in a parking lot in the 18th arrondissement, that really confirmed and consolidated where di Felice wants to lead the brand. “We called it the Courrèges Club, and we’re going to do it every time after!” he said on a Zoom call.
Courrèges Club is the name of his pre-fall collection, a kind of re-enactment of that wild epiphany of free-at-last dancing, dressing up, and togetherness. The lookbook and video are populated by the crew of “friends and family” who took part in the inaugural party. Here they are, lined up singly or in couples against a graffitied wall on an abandoned Paris train-track at night. You’ll get the anticipatory vibe by clicking to the video clip: pounding music from somewhere over the wall, a pan to a night sky and trees, the sense that everyone’s preening and posing in their taut, shiny body-pieces while mentally pawing the ground to get where the action is.
“I realized so many of my friends dress like this,” said di Felice. Notionally rolling out the Courrèges “white carpet” in a setting that smacks more of illegal rave than your regular haute Parisian house party says a lot about his mindset. He’s got up the conviction—“slowly, slowly, I want to take my time”—that he’d rather see his pieces on real people (which is happening) than merely taking his feedback from the fashion-bubble insiders.
Maybe there’s something of the nostalgia for the underground happenings that went on in clubs, fashion, and music in Paris in the ’90s about this. Or possibly Antwerp. Di Felice is Belgian, and he came to Paris and earned his stripes working at Balenciaga and Dior. What he and his friends were into in their youth resonates enviably with Gen Z. Only, what they— some of them—want to look like today is a lot sleeker and more body-exposing than your ’90s deconstructed basement grunge.
What di Felice has diagnosed is that this generation of clubbers needs bra-tops and cut-outs; they have legs, curves, and muscles to flash, and they require razor sharp silhouettes which do good selfie-service from every angle. This, as they’ve swiftly discovered, is exactly what this Courrèges brand is giving.
No matter that they might have no clue who the designer is, or that Andre Courrèges ever existed. Di Felice is one of the newest sources of catnip items for the type of customers who mass-migrate from hot brand to hot brand overnight. They will definitely be wanting what looks like the thigh-high boots in these pictures. And how thrilled will they be to find that they’re not boots at all, but block-heeled sandals which are sold with two matching lengths of latex socks? “So there’s a triple way of wearing them!”
It sounds rude to say that a designer who has all the distinguished training of di Felice is making “accessible” fashion. Part of the saleable attraction of Courrèges is that the prices are reasonable (in comparison to luxury’s insane norms), but the other part is that the designer also knows his way around cutting for comfort, and balancing out the tiny shiny vinyl with pragmatically cool trucker jackets, padded coats, and excellent boot-cut jeans.
This is just a taster, he promises, of what’s to come for Courrèges clubbers. Come the March show, he laughed, “I’m going to be a lot braver!”
