Of all the things on our AW23 bingo card, Avril Lavigne sitting frow at Paris Fashion Week wasn’t really up there, but this morning, the “Sk8er Boi” singer proved us wrong and showed up to Nicolas Di Felice’s latest Courrèges show in the 15th Arrondissement of Paris.
Sitting alongside fashion week regular Real Housewife Lisa Rinna and Girls icon Jemima Kirke, Lavigne wore a t-shirt plastered with an “I’m not doing shit today” slogan, so Di Felice should probably feel pretty honoured that she deemed the show worthy of getting out of bed for.
As per, the fashion crowd showed little to no decorum and swarmed around her to get their content (side note: the call is coming from inside the house). However, Lavigne kept quiet as her people shouted “No press!” Perhaps, if you’re the kind of person who believes in conspiracy theories, it was her clone, and opening her mouth and talking might give the game away?
The collection itself was classic Courrèges, as Di Felice turned out a series of looks that tapped into our anxieties around modern technology. The first few models out of the gate came dressed in cocoon-y overcoats, micro-minis, and slim-fit leather trousers, staring down at their phones instead of paying attention to where they were walking, the blue light flashing up and illuminating their faces.
Obsolete tech was tapped too, with the Courrèges invite taking the form of a heavy-duty silver metal disc, which ended up appearing as panels inserted into the chests of sleek backless tunic tops and glittering sequinned sheaths that rippled like code.
André Courrèges founded his namesake label in the midst of the Space Age, imagining what the clothes of the future might look like through the clean lines and cuts of his collections, but instead of living on the moon in little pods, the actual height of technology is the little oblong devices we clutch in our hands.
Now under his direction, Di Felice is rewriting Courrèges’ vision of that imagined future, with cult clothes that speak not of a world 50 years down the line, but here, and right now.