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PARIS — Nicolas Di Felice is stepping down as artistic director of Courrèges after a five-year tenure that helped revive the Parisian fashion house, owned by Pinault family holding company Artémis.
Di Felice is leaving to focus on personal projects, the brand said in a statement. His successor will be announced as soon as next week.
“I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the group and especially to François Pinault and François-Henri Pinault for their trust. I also want to truly thank all the teams and my friends, whose talent and dedication made this human and creative journey so meaningful,” Di Felice said.
In French fashion, the label “modern” tends to suggest the opposite — usually assigned to ill-judged attempts at being cool. But Di Felice’s Courrèges actually lived up to the term. Starting with Courrèges’ signature item — the cropped jacket — the designer reimagined the Space Age fashion house’s codes, stripping away the layers of “retro” that had long attached themselves to its futuristic identity. Shoulders were softened, sleeves elongated; the material became lighter, more supple. What remained was a rigorous, sexy silhouette that expressed itself consistently across the brand’s collections — timeless, but not classic.
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From his debut show in a gleaming white cube constructed at the beloved Station Gare des Mines nightclub, Di Felice infused Courrèges with a fresh, underground spark. By activating longstanding ties to contemporary artists, set designers, directors and DJs, he carved out a forward-looking message for Courrèges as well as tapping into the defiant hedonism that swept culture in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Di Felice and his crew put on slick, coherent, immersive experiences both for the brand’s Paris fashion week runway shows and its “Courrèges Club” techno parties: a runway circling a giant hourglass dripping sand (designed by contemporary artist Théo Mercier), an all-night rave in a disaffected health spa in Hyères.
As Courrèges renewed its reputation for Parisian cool with a hard-edged sexiness, owner Artémis (the investment vehicle of Kering- and Christie’s-owner François Pinault and his family) embarked on an expansion plan, opening new boutiques in Saint Germain, the Marais, New York’s Soho and California’s South Coast Plaza shopping mall.
Whether foot traffic and sales kept up with the brand’s renewed visibility is unclear (Artémis does not disclose financial results). The luxury industry continues to battle a multi-year downturn, which has hit small designer brands particularly hard. Artemis is tightly monitoring performance across even smaller assets in its portfolio as it manages a heavy debt load linked to its acquisition of talent agency CAA and lower payouts from its listed fashion unit, Kering. Artémis-backed couture house Giambattista Valli cancelled its last two runway shows.
While Courrèges declined to comment on the reason for Di Felice’s departure, a group-wide clampdown could be the right moment for the exacting, energetic designer to move on to a new opportunity. Doors are likely to open.
