Making Space

Nicolas Di Felice has taken Courrèges's sci-fi futurism and made it, says Mark Holgate, move to the beat of the global street.

It's September in New York, just after Labor Day, and Nicolas Di Felice, artistic director of Courrèges, is putting the finishing touches to the French house's new store in the city. (This is the second; the first shuttered 38 years ago.) It's in SoHo, and it's all space-age white, of course, inspired by Courrèges's original rue François 1er boutique in Paris, which Di Felice recently had renovated. After launching his couture maison in 1961, André Courrèges virtually invented the futuristic grooviness of the '60s with his gleaming vinyl jackets and we-have-liftoff go-go boots. Yet as Di Felice, 39-an animated and garrulous figure, quick to laugh and refreshingly devoid of pretension-has reimagined the Courrèges legacy since joining the house in 2020, there's been plenty of himself in the mix too. Those spacious, ever-so-slightly off-kilter mirrored changing rooms, for instance: They're based on Palladium, a nightclub that Di Felice frequented in his native Belgium, before life in Paris-and working for Nicolas Ghesquière at, first, Balenciaga and then Louis Vuitton-beckoned.

"The challenge was to find the right balance between the blanc heritage and something welcoming," he says of the store environment, which he worked on with Bernard Dubois, an old friend and fellow student at La Cambre, the Brussels art school that is also the alma mater of Anthony Vaccarello and Olivier Theyskens. "Courrèges stores are always these white spaces, and I am really obsessed with the white-but it's not the most friendly." Di Felice's solution was those fitting rooms, but also benches where anyone dropping by the store could sit and hang out. Adding warmth and intimacy and realness has been the hallmark of his reinvention of Courrèges, which has become distinctly cool, yes, but never cold.