They’re bound to read as veils in the pictures, but the five face coverings at the beginning of the Courrèges show don’t have any religious origins—they are in fact functional UV blockers. Nicolas Di Felice was explaining this backstage before he sent out the collection he named “Blinded by the Sun.” He’d seen this sort of product for sale when he was traveling in Thailand, he told us. In his redesign, the fabric is attached to peaked caps, draped across the face and then tucked onto the waist band of an A-line miniskirt in the same fabric.
As the show began, a voice started to read out temperatures taken on a summer’s day. “She” was up in the 40s by the afternoon. Well, it certainly felt like that in June, when we were doing the rounds of the menswear shows. Global heating wasn’t a subject when André Courrèges was alive: the 1960s and ’70s were more a phase of sun-worshipping. Anyway, Di Felice was out to conduct various experiments in cut to show what a modern Courrèges wardrobe could look like in heatwave conditions, always with his precise eye for showing skin and the possibility of a rave in the offing.
He’s particularly good at the asymmetric wrapping of tops, the geometry involved in the cutting away of shoulder lines on bodysuits and creating fusions of garments. Shorts became a long skirt in the back. Leather motorcycle jackets had sleeves which unzipped vertically, so you could take the benefit of the breeze.
Di Felice also used global heating as a metaphor—and to push the design towards more extreme ideas about melting. “When there’s lots of sun, sometimes you can’t really see what you’re looking at,” he noted.
Several pieces were made from multiple narrow belts, exuding a kind of shiny wetness. “I love these—they kind of multiply, multiply, and kind of melt; the tube-like the bracelets too,” he said. “And the more the sun is out, the warmer the colors and then the pieces even become transparent, they disappear.”
The shape of a car windshield was used to create rounded solar face shields, rising up from dresses and tops. True to André Courrèges’s ‘futurism’ but with a lot less of the optimism about it. There was no major conceptual set to enjoy this time—just an infernal circle of lights above which became brighter, hotter and more intolerable as the time went on.