Last week, Nicolas Di Felice, the artistic director of Courrèges, posted to Instagram Stories a video he had taken of the Paris skyline at night, his camera slowly panning across the city. Di Felice had taken the video from a vantage point relatively new to him: the roof of the atelier on Rue Saint Martin in the city’s Marais neighbourhood, where he has been working since late last year on his vision of haute couture for the house. It will be shown tomorrow amidst the other autumn/winter 2024 couture shows, with Di Felice joining the ever-growing roll call of designers who have guested at Gaultier for one season, including Haider Ackermann, , Glenn Martens and Olivier Rousteing.
Di Felice’s video couldn’t have been a more cinematic – or evocative – curtain-raiser on what it means to design the couture for one of the most iconic designers ever. Put simply: It means that you’re at the very pinnacle of Paris fashion. Gaultier, after all, is the designer who made Paris cool in the 1980s (snatching the crown from London) with his insanely influential collections which, over the years and decades, riffed on everything from underwear-as-outerwear, with all its corsetry lacing and pointy bras, to pinstripe tailoring, tattoos, traditional Hasidic dress, Breton stripes, punk, piercings, Mongolia and Folies Bergère feathers – all of it worn by everyone from Madonna to Neneh Cherry, and all the while becoming a pop cultural icon in his own right.
The designer worked wit.