Courrèges. Spring 2024 - Paris Fashion Week.

(Images:  Courrèges 2023.  WWD/Vogue 2023)

Nicolas Di Felice's inclination towards the Avant-garde is more evident with his Spring 2024 collection for Courrèges, taking the late André Courrèges, who passed away in 2016, signature label into risqué territory.  Which makes sense as experimental fashion and the creative elements of Avant-garde are now solidifying itself as a benchmark trend for 2024.  And if you know your fashion history, André Courrèges was that quintessential modernist and futurist designer, who emerged from the counterculture template of 1960s, embracing modernism, technology and Space travel as focal points to human endeavour.   The 60s imparted liberation through science, as an important humanist milestone that allowed women to become sexually active under their own freedom of choice.  The contraceptive pill offered that release from the conservatism and stagnated 1950s, and futurism was front and centre as an inspiration, when nuclear power promised unlimited energy, sans highly toxic plutonium.  And the Space race invoigrated that enticing possibility that humans would one day conquer the cosmos.  Yet, festering underneath these mid-century utopian dreams were crumbling Western cities, smog, pollution, hyperconsumption and thermonuclear weapons.  It was the 1970s that injected the right amount of hedonism into the youth of the 60s.  And this is where I feel  Di Felice sits, in between Courrèges modernist wonderland of the 1960s, and the hedonistic sexual intensity of the 1970s.

As noted with prior reviews of his collections I have noticed Di Felice offer a spiritual slant or at least an expression of challenging aspects of our materialistic world, to which fashion holds as one of its many contradictions.  Noted with his Fall 2023 collection, Di Felice commentated on our dependence of the digital age.  Akin to the 1960's, where technology was supposed to set us free.  Our mobile phones were touted to offer so much, but delivered so little apart from a feigned belief of significance via social media apps.  Is there a new counterculture brewing on the horizon?  So far it feels illusive, despite our similarities to the 1960s and 1970s, society, as it stands today, is fastly more vexed.

Di Felice's latest collection, as mentioned, has leaned towards the more hedonistic, rather than any societal questioning.  And this is where the Avant-garde asymmetrical cuts and offset fits, have created a paradoxical element to Di Felice's Courrèges.  The clean modernist looks have been replaced by Studio 54-esque late 70s amatory, with off the shoulder shirts, see-through tulle tops, thigh-high split skirts.  Complemented by models wearing leather knee high boots and ankle strap mules.  Which if one is to analyse, Di Felice' 'knee high boots' they're more attuned to Fall collections, rather than Spring.  But, with pedantic observations aside, Di Felice's has certainty up the ante for his cocktail lounge attire, whist tweaking in the experimental.  Seen with the Plexiglas bra and Avant-garde inspired jewelry.

However, Di Felice's Fall 2024 array for Courrèges, despite the experimental sentiment, has an overtly serious impression, even with its hedonist overtures, it exudes a rigid demeanor.  Which may align with an impassiveness, that our current time line represents.  

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(A.Glass 2023)