Courrèges - Pre-fall 2024

A trend that is emerging at the tailend of 2023 and now Four months into 2024, to which the Pre-Fall 2024 collections ala lookbooks, are beginning to manifest. In lieu for the mid/end year Northern Hemisphere Autumn/Winter, is the bondage inspired and fetish wears.  And with climate change already causing havoc with global weather patterns, the uncertainty of what is instore for us under the indifference of the natural construct, has become harder to predict.   The other noted impact on not just fashion, but everything in general, is the Western world leaning further to the Right Wing spectrum of politics.  And if a social cue can be seen, it would be that society is becoming more conservative.  Which has been brewing for a while now, with the beat up of the so called Left wing digression, which never really existed as a bonafide counterculture of the last decade, has yet to materialize. 

Nicolas Di Felice Courrèges collections has always offered that humanist hope, that very much align with the late designer André Courrèges, who passed away in 2016, that the future will be better.  Renown for his 1960s "Space Age" inspired styles, as the utopian desires of the 1950s began to peter out, replaced by a youthful counterculture who were eager to remove the shackles of conservatism, to which Courrèges said for his Spring 1964 collection, that  "A woman's body must be hard and free, not soft and harnessed. The harness, the girdle and bra - is the chain of the slave"  Hence why, Di Felice has maintained Courrèges template of braless models, and oval cutout shapes, centered around the chest and midriff. 

So, is the next counterculture going to be sexual in nature?  Or at least a new found liberational element of the carnal.  How is that possible?  With social media feeds inundated with narcissism and celebritydom.  Does sex still sell?  Maybe the issue is less the commercialisation of the sexual, but the rejection of its digital imprint.  Millions of selfies in front of mirrors has now become tiring, and ultimately self defeating for the ego.  Sex is the ultimate protest against the rigidity of the stagnated Middle Class.  Yes, we have seen all this before.  But, maybe it's time for a redux.  Without using a cell phone. 

For Courrèges Pre-Fall 2024 collection, Di Felice drew on the late John Sutcliffe, who created the cult Fetish Magazine AtomAge, which was the stalwart leather, rubber and PVC fetishism magazine throughout the early 1970s and into the 1980s, until Sutcliffe was charged with obscenity, by the UK authorities in the mid 1980s.   And there maybe a slight contradiction to Courrèges statement of being free from being 'harnessed', as opposed to Di Felice's fetish imprint for his Pre-Fall stylisations.  

Yet, Di Felice latest array is not as risqué as it could be, however his fetish aspects are certainly there, from the latex, PVC and the eroticsim that is of the 'zipper'.  A mystique of what lies behind, is the lasting appeal that bodage wear holds for the individual, as a powerful metaphor of domination and protection of sexuality.  That both the feminine and masculine can hold equally within the sexual realm.  Also noted, are the tartan and denim throughout the collection, reflecting the late 1970s punk fascination with bondage as a fashionable imprint of a bygone counterculture. 

When all said and done, in its metaphor or otherwise.  Sex, at the end of the world, is actually very liberating.

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(A.Glass 2024)