Courrèges. Fall 2025 - Paris Fashion Week.

 

Nicolas Di Felice continues to evoke, albeit at a steady pace, the late André Courrèges modernist template into an avant garde spectacle.  And as noted from my Courrèges Spring 2025 review, Courrèges as a label, was in name only towards the end of André Courrège's life, after he sold the brand name to Groupe Artemis.  Where it struggled to redefine itself after the famed designer passed away in 2016, with his aesthetic representation of the future we never had of its 1950s utopian dream of being set free by technology.  Courrèges in the decades that followed, have churned through creative directors like no tomorrow, with the La Cambre fashion graduate Di Felice holding the line, while slowly deconstructing Courrèges into a revamped version of his retrofitted Dystopia, that was once André Courrèges 50s esque Utopia.  

And Di Felice maybe or may not be offering a clue with his Fall 2025 collection, that as the world shifts further towards the Far Right, we may need to begin the implementation of a counterculture that appears, at this point in time, very elusive.  So, in retrospect André Courrèges modernist and futurist template of over 70 years ago, is probably not very appropriate when we have a unelected, billionaire and autocratic futurist trying to reignite what the 1950s futurism should have been like, if there were no countercultures/liberation movements in the years that followed, which, thankfully, did indeed change the course of oppressive conservatism.  

But, is the deconstructive, avant garde fashion the 'look' to herald in a counterculture?  Probably not, as the artisan, drapey looks of the early 2000s, which petered out by 2018, with only a handful of designers left standing, where very much apolitical.  Rather, the said styles toyed with the idea of a dark and broken future, as a fashionable recourse.  And the fashion industry overall could be in a state of flux, as much as the world is or more so in a state of shock at how ruthless Trumpansim 2.0 is actually becoming. 

Di Felice has mixed the asymmetrical one piece mini skirts, oversized jackets, and a stylised rawer flow to the eros trend of 2020, which is still poking through as one of the stalwart fashion trends of the last four years.   Downplaying colour in the collection, and opting for the washed out monchomaic looks, with Courrèges's modernist inspired pink and reds.  Di Felice's latest array is not as risqué as previous collections, nor does it appear to be inspiring a newer direction for the brand.

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(A.Glass 2025)