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 summer grandes vacances of weeks and weeks and weeks 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.
With its classic palette (black, white, red, and beige) and the honesty of the fabrics (cotton, wool, denim, leather, and suede) it serves up a very current mix of creativity, functionality, and relevancy. Oh, and let’s throw in desirability here too, because he has also delivered that in spades. “I really need to work [the clothes] on the body. Something might seem simple,” he went on to say, “but we really do fit everything; we work on them—the jackets, the skirts, the trenches, even the simplest pieces—from A to Z.”
So the belting on those shorts of his gets deconstructed, turned into bands which variously belt his lean trousers, or fall in skinny panels from their hips; other times, they’re used as buttoned cuffs at the ankles, their hems falling crisply onto his Courrèges-y update of his scuba footwear, rendered now as slippers and boots in soft black stretch leather. Over Zoom he was keen to emphasize the shoes’ believability, which he attributes to retaining their practicality. “I wanted to stay true to how they are usually made,” he said, “and not over-design them, because I am that kind of person. Too many details and I wouldn’t wear them.”
Speaking of details, one is worked to great effect, with the collars of his trenches in cotton and leather (the latter being one of the chic-est things I have clapped eyes on in quite some time) falling onto one shoulder and sleeve; the same detailing gets added to roomier, blouson versions cropped at the hips. And that 1970 collection of Andre Courrèges’ provides the motif of a looped band over the chest, which delivers a geometric flash of skin on tanks and dresses that work right across the gender spectrum.
Di Felice has struck the right chord with gender at Courrèges, making the house-classic glossy vinyl jackets work for anyone and everyone—though this collection speaks a little more loudly to those halcyon ’70s days of unisex, with his bibbed tops (the front panels of fabric supported by a body of invisible mesh) worn with yet more of his killer, kicky pants. Some of the bibs are embellished with band detailing, which he took from the arrows painted onto stones that he sees when he’s walking on the trails in the summertime. His images of them snapped on holiday also made their way onto his moodboard. One arrow pointed one way, one pointed the other, but what’s clear from this collection, Di Felice is only going in the right direction.
