Di Felice's minimal warriors for Jean Paul Gaultier's haute couture

With the Jean Paul Gaultier's 2024 haute couture, guest designer Nicolas Di Felice demonstrated what happens when a minimalist designer meets the archive of a notoriously maximalist maison. The silhouettes become streamlined, the accessories shrink, the palette turns monochromatic, and the looks become even more sculptural. Instead of trying to step into the shoes of fashion’s enfant terrible, the creative director of Courreges skillfully chose to rewrite its aesthetic codes according to his own artistic vision. Paradoxically, the result managed to steer the maison towards a more modern dimension while preserving everything that the fashion industry audience cherishes about Gaultier: corsets, theatricality, a scientific attention for the female body, and passionate references to distant cultures. This is the first time in the history of the Jean Paul Gaultier Couture guest design project, which began in 2020, that the brand has experimented with such a "strict" creative director. With Glenn Martens, the maison had fun experimenting with the textile world; with Simone Rocha, it explored hyper-feminine fashion; and with Haider Ackermann, it discovered couture in its most essential form. With Di Felice, Jean Paul Gaultier Couture enters a whole new chapter, characterized by a comforting sensuality that covers the face but showcases the body. 

At the show, held at the brand's headquarters, the room was rendered entirely white, a blank canvas that Di Felice knows very well. Among the benches, as always, fashion students, guests dressed in drag, and other visionaries of the fashion industry gathered around Jean Paul Gaultier, seated front row. With the first looks covering the models' bodies entirely from the forehead down, the expectations of those present were completely shattered, as their faces took on expressions of astonishment in front of leather jackets and trench coats with large batwing sleeves rising above the nape and tight-fitting dresses that climbed up to the eyes of the models. The blazer, which in Gaultier's world has always had wide shoulders, here was twisted around the hips as if wrung out, paired with lace, while interesting scaffolds supported the dresses in the air, draped all around the bodies, adding geometric shapes to otherwise organic silhouettes. After a couple of looks that hinted at the creation process of a garment, with deliberately half-sewn blue and black pinstripe prototype suits, the shield that Di Felice built on the backs, chests, and faces of the models fell to reveal bodies almost in their entirety. The Gaultier-esque structure remained, with the white bones of the corset holding up transparent organza veils knotted at the navel. The earlier trench became khaki and beige, transforming into a piece of armor with only a sleeve incorporated into the miniskirt, and the leather jackets turned into long skirts worn over tailored pants that dropped precisely to brush the floor. 

Apart from the choice to celebrate Gaultier's archive in such a clean manner, what made Di Felice's first couture collection so exciting was the alternation of references between one designer and another. While initially the corset and face structure nodded to both Gaultier and Di Felice, the glove, pinstripe, chainmail, and silver jewelry like the nose ring subtly took inspiration from the founder's 90s collections. Meanwhile, details like the pubic pocket and the concept of extreme see-through looked to Di Felice's latest collections for Courreges. With a show essentially distant from the dynamic, rich, and original universe of Jean Paul Gaultier, Di Felice operated within his own comfort zone. Perhaps a bit more audacity would have been appreciated given the uniqueness of the event, but nonetheless, the show left everyone in awe, Gaultier included.