Having spent their first two seasons at Courrèges establishing their wardrobe building blocks, Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant felt ready to sketch their vision of the Courrèges woman with their spring lineup.
Yet they didn’t stray far from the tenets laid down by founder André Courrèges. The duo called the collection Couture Future, after the high-end line he launched in 1967 when the house was transitioning from couture to ready-to-wear.
They opened with a series of thigh-skimming dresses with X-shaped seams that split at the front to form a kangaroo pocket. Most of the subsequent looks came with trousers, ranging from flared white jeans with frayed seams to sequined black evening pants.
A series of round-shouldered short-sleeve tops with matching pants brought to mind the uniforms of the flight attendants in the sci-fi classic “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The designers also experimented with 3-D printing, which was used to create two sheer plasticky vest tops.
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“There are pieces that are very couture, but mixed with more current pieces, which creates an interesting contrast and shows the couture pieces have aged very well,” said Meyer. “That is something we care about a lot at Courrèges: quality and slightly timeless designs.”
Vintage Courrèges designs continue to exert a powerful hold on contemporary designers, and it is right for the house to want to reclaim that heritage. But it’s a fine line between paying homage to the past and getting stuck in it, and not every look brought something fresh to the table.