Courrèges. Fall 2022 Ready-to-Wear - Paris Fashion Week
(Images: Courrèges 2022)
Creative director Nicolas di Felice who debuted with Courrèges in 2021 for their Fall Ready-to-Wear collection, having replaced Yolanda Zobel, attempted to redefine the iconic label as a lookbook affair whilst he was was still in lockdown throughout 2020 and 2021. Di Felice has not only rebooted the luxury brand that has churned through creative directors over the many years, but he has also sourced the streets for ideas, while reinstating the Courrèges fine tailoring and aesthetics that André Courrèges was renown for. Melding that modernism and avant garde and its cultural backlash that was 1960's, which was not only the dawn of the computer chip and space age, it was also holding onto that desire to create a technological utopian wonderland, in a vain hope to set us all free, under the guise of society turmoil and threat of thermonuclear war, which could break out at any moment. So, this latent optimism mixed with Cold War annihilation has returned with Courrèges's latest collection, instilling the paradox of optimism with a darker and gloomy presentation, that, for all its purpose, represents the calamity of a world in this current time-line. Yes, we do appear to be repeating the past.
And prior to the pandemic there was another trend emerging that seem to be an attempt at releasing the conservative shackles that the fashion industry, in reflection of our wider society, had been attached to by bringing in a more Eros stylization to the runways. With everything in a flux post pandemic, with designers scrambling to cater for falling luxury demand from China, through to supply/material shortages and rising costs effecting every industry. Maybe this does constituent to less-is-more on the runway with mini skirts and skimpy attires that could be, rather than any backlash, a necessity in keeping manufacturing costs down.
What ever the case, di Felice has delivered a relevant Fall 2022 collection for Courrèges, holding true to the brand's Futurist Cold War styles, whilst attaching Courrèges 60's love affair with synthetic materials such as vinyl and imitation leathers, with a renewed sexual vigor of a bygone counter culture, that ironically, did throw away the shackles of 1950s conservatism. Which, in a strange embrace, we could be have been emulating as a reflection of that feigned stability to which an institutionalized society appears to offer. All the while, globally everything seems to be crumbling around us in the wake of social, political and economic upheaval. The question has to be asked: Is there a new counter culture on the way?
In its elusiveness of any contemporary rebellion, di Felice is certainty not leading the charge here with his latest Courrèges collection, rather he maybe offering an insight into what could be at least an amorous revolution, maybe even a individualist protest against a world gone mad, that at the end of the day, it could be the antihero, the rogue and rebellious other that maybe that counter culture that we all seek. And she doesn't care.
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(A.Glass 2022)
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