This story originally appeared in i-D’s The New Wave Issue, no. 373, Fall/Winter 2023. Order your copy here.
Growing up in the Belgian countryside, Nicolas di Felice had never come across an issue of i-D — or any fashion magazine for that matter. “I don’t remember having seen a single fashion magazine in my childhood, and I was always going to the newsstand because that was also where you’d buy cigarettes for your parents, or candies for yourself,” he laughs. Rather, his introduction to fashion was through music. Fanatically watching music videos as a child in the 90s, the creative director of Courrèges first understood clothing as one of the building blocks of identity, a kind of self-expression that fused perfectly with the music he loved.
Music, alongside dancing and partying, is still part of the fabric of Nicolas’ life. Although he no longer makes his own music (but wants to start again: “I have something in me, a feeling that says ‘I need to make it again soon!’”) when he moved to Paris in 2008 to work under Nicolas Ghesquière at Balenciaga, it was through the city’s club scene that he connected with some of his closest friends and collaborators: Erwan Sene, Anna Dotigny and Allegria Torassa. “I met Nicolas during several parties,” recalls Anna, now Artistic Director of the Courrèges Club. “I especially remember one night with him: a rainy, post-rave sunset in the forest.” Similarly, Erwan, who curates the music for each club night as well as the Courrèges fashion shows, recalls that he was introduced to Nicolas ten years ago and “we were attracted by the night and the music that punctuated it — the night as a formative experience.”
When Nicolas took over the reins at Courrèges in 2020, the French heritage brand was struggling to maintain relevancy following its revival nine years prior. “The house was really small when I took over. It just wasn’t working anymore. It was like a start-up,” he explains. Nicolas confesses that, without his friends, his tenure at the brand wouldn’t have been possible. “Really, Courrèges is such a collaborative project that, without the people around me, it wouldn’t exist.” And so, it was only fitting that to mark his first in-person runway show for SS22, the designer and his friends threw a raging afterparty: “We were going to parties. We were already organising parties. We just wanted to offer that to the people.” Dubbed the ‘Courrèges Club’, the ephemeral parties have now crystallised into one of the most anticipated events during Paris Fashion Week.
Granted, for a brand to throw a party is, in and of itself, nothing that groundbreaking. The two worlds often go hand-in-hand: nightlife is the perfect setting to move new collections into the ‘real’ world, to spread hype, and, perhaps in today’s media-crazed world, to create ‘content’. But Nicolas’ parties for Courrèges were never conceived of as a fashionable networking event, as so many fashion week parties can be. “Nico’s desire is to create a real party, where music and communion are the priorities,” explains Erwan. “He removes everything that can make a fashion aftershow boring.”
Inspired by the Cicciolina parties organised by Allegria — “she was the only one who threw parties during fashion week where people were really, really dancing” — the designer has only the most honest intentions for the Club, a testament to his Belgian raver roots. “One of the most beautiful images for me is just watching people dance, on the same rhythm,” he muses on the allure of the parties, “no matter who you are or where you’re from, everybody is dancing to the same song.” And, Anna adds, “it comes as a much-needed fresh and wild parenthesis in the Paris Fashion Week marathon.”
From Courrèges Club to the streamlined, dance floor-ready silhouettes of his collections, Nicolas’ vision for Courrèges has meshed perfectly with the brand’s DNA. André Courrèges was, after all, the designer who brought us the leg-baring, body-skimming mini dresses of 1960s Space Age fashion — silhouettes that liberated women’s bodies and movement in radical and unprecedented ways. Nicolas’ appreciation for club music as a sort of musica practica — as Roland Barthes once called the vein-throbbing ‘muscular music’ that is ‘heard’, or experienced, through the body — has enabled him to create lithe, body-conscious ensembles combining second-skin-like mini dresses and thigh-high go-go-esque boots that echo the lubricating effects of dance.
“I’m sure that dance club scenes are really in the DNA of my vision, but I don’t even realise it,” he reflects. “But it’s true that when I make clothes, I always think ‘Who is the Courrèges girl? How is she going to move? How is she going to dance in the clothes?’” Intentionally or not, Nicolas has created the unofficial uniform of today’s Parisian club scene (who knows how many of his Reedition Vinyl jackets have been lost to club cloakrooms?) and continues the house’s legacy as a totem of freedom and movement.
Despite the cool, laissez-aller attitude with which Nicolas curates the Courrèges Club, its success is due in no small part to the all-in collaborative effort of the designer’s friends to differentiate the experience from other fashion parties, and to inject a shock of unbridled fun back into Parisian nightlife post-lockdown. From scouting for unorthodox locations — a disused underground parking garage at the northern cusp of the périphérique; an industrial yard in the inner suburb of Romainville — and creating each space with set designer Remy Brière to developing innovative lighting with design collective Matière Noire, Anna dreams of creating “a space of freedom where people come together… where everyone can move and dance in a safe environment, to good music, in a location that doesn’t look like their usual club.”
While Anna designs the perfect ambience for the Courrèges clubgoers, Erwan poetically curates a line-up that translates the visual essence of Nicolas’ latest collections for Courrèges onto the dance floor. “What we seek with music is to develop a narrative framework nourished by our own history, memories and fantasies, to bring the collection to life,” he explains of the process. “We open this big box of ideas and then we try to reduce as much as possible.” Nicolas’ friends regularly play — Anna as Mykonos and Erwan as Erwan Sene — alongside a host of DJs from across the world the team are keen to bring to Paris introducing (once lesser-known) talent like LSDXOXO and ISAbella to the fashion crowd.
Nicolas is quick to reiterate that he never intended for Courrèges Club to have the sizzling impact on Parisian nightlife that it has already achieved. But it’s important to remember that the first edition of the party was held following the lifting of those soul-destroying lockdowns which had left the city’s club scene in tatters. Most Parisian club owners opted to shutter their establishments for good rather than try to navigate partying with social distancing. And so, on a cultural and social plane, the Club’s cult status makes sense: the purity in spirit shared by Nicolas and his friends, who believe in partying as a human connector, to foster togetherness, was a much-needed social glue in a fragmented city. “This is what we are trying to do with the Courrèges Club parties,” affirms Anna, “to open up the scene to new locations and spaces, make everything a bit crazier every time and bring in the natural madness that Paris always wears!”
Or, as Nicolas so earnestly puts it: “I think that with most things, when you’re doing them for good reasons, with love, in celebration of those around you, most of the time they work out. And I have a feeling that’s the case for this.”
Credits
Photography Lola & Pani
Fashion Dan Sablon
Hair Karim Belghiran at Total World
Makeup Morgane Martini at The Wall Group using Byredo
Photography Assistance Thomas Pigeon and Vincenzo Sassu
Fashion Assistance Clara Viano Faruel
Hair Assistance Akiko Kawano
Makeup Assistance Jieyu Wang
Production Canvas Represents and Jad Assad
Casting Director Samuel Ellis Scheinman for DMCASTING
Casting Assistance Alfredo Bisciotti for DMCASTING
Models Ilias Loopmans at Rapture, Grace Gay at Titanium, Ivana Trivic at Girl, Marina Moioli at Premium, Ilya Vermeulen and Farah Nieuwburg at Platform
All clothing and accessories COURRÈGES