After Jean Paul Gaultier bowed out of his namesake house in early 2020, the raucous designer has turned his atelier over to a succession of guest creatives: among them, Glenn Martens, Simone Rocha, Olivier Rousteing, and Julien Dossena. For the AW24 season, it was the turn of Nicolas Di Felice, whose day job involves heading up the house of Courrèges – since taking over at its helm four years ago, the Belgian designer and Balenciaga alumnus has transformed the label from dusty 60s relic to bonafide fave among cool, sexy kids across the globe.
Debuted during the AW24 Paris Haute Couture week in June, Di Felice’s Gaultier collection seamlessly fused the designer’s slick, less-is-more sensibility with iconic markers dredged from the depths of JPG’s archive. The invite, a strip of heavyweight calico-coloured card fastened with a neat row of hooks and eyes, was a sign of things to come. With their connotations of corsetry or the unfastening of a bra, the offering tapped into the idea of undressing slowly, sensually, and deliberately, and played out on the runway with looks that first covered up the models’ bodies, before revealing more and more of their flesh – a flash of clavicle first, a neckline that sunk lower on the chest next, before eventually, a barely-there draped mini exposed the entire back, as worn by the likes of Arca and Alex Consani.
But better to hear more about it from the man himself. In the last few chaotic hours before the show, Dazed was given exclusive access inside Jean Paul Gaultier HQ, where we pulled Di Felice for a chat. In a sweaty corner office, the designer talked us through his moodboards, his iconic casting, and what it meant to him to be steering the JPG ship for a season after becoming obsessed with the designer as a teen growing up in the middle-of-nowhere in Belgium. Alongside this, there’s a peep at the level of work that goes into bringing a show like this one to life – from hair and make-up, to the production crew and beyond – and a sweet conversation with Alex Consani, who remembers how her grandmother took her to a Gaultier exhibition and she fell in love there and then.
Watch it above and click through the full collection in the gallery below.