We all know this about the best shows: when something forces you off your phone, whooshes you up into the present, keeps you visually mesmerized—and actually tells you about the designer, the clothes, and who they’re for—well, we realize what exceptionally lucky people we are to be around fashion. Such a thing occurred this morning, thanks to Nicolas Di Felice at Courrèges, as we watched a rectangle of red, pink, blue and silver tag-shaped confetti rise up and form a dancing cloud before our eyes. Then, by some magic performed by scenographer Rémy Briere, instead of raining down in a standard end-of-party cliché ritual it proceeded to stay up there for the entire show, raving ecstatically to the beat of Erwan Sene and Di Felice’s remix of Chantal’s “The Realm.”
This astonishing, endorphin-inducing metaphor for togetherness served not just as a pretty backdrop but as Di Felice’s formation of Courrèges as a club—an elegant cult-status fashion club for the young, whip-thin and beautiful. Backstage before the show, he was explaining how the confetti concept came via an art book by Dan Colen. “I looked at the streamers in his work and said, ’Okay, maybe I can work on that.’ So I took a rectangle, like a scarf, and started wrapping it, very simply, on the body.”
Not so simply, though. Di Felice knows his way around cutting and draping; he’s one of the stable of Belgian graduates of the La Cambre school in Brussels who has a self-inculcated drive to keep inventing. His tailoring was sheared off at angles, producing asymmetric mini-wrap skirts, multiple options for party dressing. Abbreviated tunics became chic over-the-head parkas.
Sure, there were images of André Courrèges’s 1960s space-age minimalism on his reference board, but Di Felice’s aesthetic, while still clean and concise, is less block-y and more sexy. He worked out how the scarf-streamers can stay on—their wearers have to dance, after all—with see-through net underpinnings. And how to deploy a single ostrich feather as an evening top. That was sensational. As for the show as a whole, that’s now added to the playlist hard drive as one of the fashion moments that won’t be forgotten.
