12/14/2023 0 Comments Space age 60s fashion![]() He favored flat shoes, modern fabrics like PVC and plastic, and A-line silhouettes that were meant to be worn without a bra, as opposed to the strict New Look with its wasp waists and padded busts. Perhaps his biggest innovation, though, was his insistence that women be comfortable. Some inventions, like oversized sunglasses with eyelashes on their lenses, never went beyond the realm of sixties curios. He was widely credited with inventing the miniskirt (though that distinction is disputed, with Mary Quant also laying claim to it) and the so-called “second-skin”- think a onesie made from tights. Audrey Hepburn sported one of his signature “little white dresses” while playing a kooky heiress in How to Steal a Million. Some found it infantilizing, with the AP saying, “e stops just short of diapers in giving age-conscious American women the youngest collection of clothes ever cut in adult sizes.” But women caught on faster than the critics did, and soon enough, everyone from Catherine Deneuve to Nancy Reagan could be seen in his designs. The press wasn’t always sure how to take his message, especially in the era of incipient women’s lib. He worked under Cristóbal Balenciaga for a decade before starting his namesake line in 1961 (with a fiscal assist from Balenciaga himself). “Sometimes a dress isn’t able to communicate all the emotions that I wish to convey,” he said.īorn in Pau, a city in southwest France, Courrèges began studying civil engineering before switching to fashion. Later on, he turned his design energies to Hitachi robots, Honda motor scooters and Minolta cameras. ![]() A former engineer, he had a lifelong fascination with science and technology, and called his studio his “secret laboratory.” He even went so far as to design a bubble-shaped electric car called La Bulle - back in 1969, long before Tesla came on the scene. The designer, who passed away yesterday at age 92 after battling Parkinson’s disease, preferred to bypass the archives and put his energy into innovative space-inspired looks. Fashion designers tend to find their greatest inspiration in eras past, but André Courrèges had his feet firmly planted towards the future.
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