Sometimes the best ideas spring from the simplest of sources. So too do the best collections, like Nicolas Di Felice’s terrific men’s and women’s resort for Courrèges, which he showed via a presentation in the Marais neighborhood in Paris. (Just to add to his workload, he also opened the maison’s newest boutique in the same ‘hood, on Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, the very same day.
) “I’ve always looked around me before starting a collection,” Di Felice said via Zoom one recent afternoon, “and March here in Paris was recorded as being one of the greatest months without sun. To be honest with you, it hasn’t changed much because we’re in June and it’s still raining and pretty dark outside! Lots of us are talking about escape: We need sun, we need vacation.” (It’s safe to say that that simple and direct statement speaks for us all.
) Di Felice is already planning his holidays, and intends to spend some of those glorious, traditional French summer of weeks and weeks weeks off—envious, me?—by revisiting the Greek island of Amorgos, where he will hike the coastal trails in sports shorts and scuba sneakers. And in the way a designer’s mind can alight on connections like a stone skimming across the Aegean waters, that’s where this season really started. “As I was organizing my summer, I thought, OK, I would like to put the details of the construction of what I usually wear then,” he said, “but I didn’t want to do sporty clothes at the end of th.