Nicolas Di Felice

Nicolas Di Felice lives around the corner and loves to watch people too. On a Thursday night in late May, we go on a sightseeing trip, settling down at Café des Délices (which, totally coincidentally, almost rhymes with his last name). We order americanos, the tangy cocktail, not the coffee. At a table near us sits a handsome man in big grey trousers and Onitsuka Tiger trainers, his oversized blue bomber wrapped around him like a duvet. “That’s Robin,” says Nicolas matter of factly. It turns out they used to work with one another. “Now he’s a decorator and he plays guitar, which I find sexy.” An older man asks for some spare change and lingers around for a friendly chat with Nicolas. Nice cargo pants, I say when he’s moved on. “Very nice. We call that shade mud-brown,” says Nicolas.
Nicolas has spent the last couple of months more indoors than he’d prefer – he’s this season’s guest designer at Jean Paul Gaultier’s couture studio, in addition to his day job at Courrèges, the classic poppy French label where he’s been creative director for the last four years. “I’m really locked between four walls. At the start of the season I was at Gaultier for one day a week, but now we’re there seven days a week, working on the collection. Luckily, the weather has been so bad, I’ve hardly felt the urge to go out. But it’s the bigger danger in our jobs, I think, that we sit inside and don’t see enough people, how they dress and move and interact. I need that.”

A girl in a tracksuit comes over to ask for a cigarette. When she’s back at her table, puffing away at her Marlboro Gold, Nicolas says: “She’s cute. The way she acts.” I ask if it’s anything specific. Perhaps the way she dresses? “No, just everything,” he says. “Her personality. The way she slowly, quietly approached us – very chic. Even in that big tracksuit. Did you see her eyes? Really cute.”

Some people observe intriguing strangers by the clothes they wear – there’s that classic rule about being able to judge an entire look by someone’s shoes – but for Nicolas it’s more about the body. “I first look at the person,” he says. “The way she walks, the way she moves, the way she looks at you. How the body expresses itself, and then: the eyes, the eyes, the eyes. That’s the most important thing. Then, maybe, I look at the clothes.” Magazines sometimes ask him if there’s any type of clothing he particularly dislikes but he’s never really able to answer. He’s more of an egalitarian. “Honestly, I think all clothes can look good on one person and really bad on somebody else. It’s the way people wear it. That’s what being classy is about.”

What can be particularly interesting, says Nicolas, is a combination of opposites. The secret of a good look is not in perfection but in a surprising clash of contrasting elements. “I’m really not a suit-and-tie person, but when you’re in New York and you walk around Wall Street and you see these banker guys with their rolled-up sleeves smoking a cigarette outside, arms full of tattoos, I think that’s hot. Do you have tattoos?”

I don’t. Does Nicolas?

“Yes. The first one was when I was 15, on my arm. It was terrible, done by a girl who’d never set a tattoo before. Can you imagine?”

On his other arm he has a tattoo with the initials of his ex-boyfriend, done a year after they broke up: “He was quite surprised when he saw it!” Nicolas is particularly pleased with the tattoos on his legs: ‘Futurism’ on one leg and ‘Passéism’ on the other, after his favourite song by American rock band Blonde Redhead.

Nicolas was born in the Walloon countryside near Charleroi. They call it le pays noir, the black country, famous for its coal-mining industry. Both his grandfathers moved from Italy to Belgium to work as miners. “My blood is 100% Italian,” he says.

Parli italiano?

“I understand it but don’t speak it.”

He was a happy child. “Di felice, no matter what! Intense childhood. Happy, coo-coo, hyperactive, dancing, drawing. I had a lot of energy. I loved music. I learnt solfège – really boring – and played the clarinet,” he says. “Then, when I was 12 or 13, I got my first software to make electronic music, and I didn’t stop until I moved to Paris and didn’t have time for music anymore. Maybe one day I’ll pick it up again.” For a while he had a band in which they all took turns in singing. “Trust me, it was good to realise that I shouldn’t be the one singing.” He was a fan of an obscure Dutch duo, Weval, whose first album he adored. “There’s nothing sexier than watching musicians play. I must have seen Weval play ten times or more, and they’re really not particularly good-looking, but I would have married them both. The fact that they could make this music!”

In Brussels, Nicolas studied in the fashion department of La Cambre art school – “one of the best schools in the world,” he says. “They make sure that you learn how to make clothes. One of the first projects was to stitch 25 metres of fabric, pleated. That’s important to me; it’s a really great technical school. We couldn’t hire seamstresses to make our collections, so we had to make everything ourselves. That’s why I can do everything: I can drape, I make patterns, I correct patterns, I can stitch

whatever fabric, I’m good at leather.” The school was rich in creative talent. Matt­hieu Blazy, now at Bottega Veneta, was there. Julien Dossena, now at Paco Rabanne, was a close friend. Anthony Vaccarello, the current Saint Laurent designer and from a comparable Italian immigrant background, was a few years above Nicolas. “I love Anthony. I love his consistency – at school he was already doing the same thing he does today. The way he’s running Saint Laurent: it’s luxury, it looks expensive, rich, chic, his shows… I have so much respect for that.”

While at school, Nicolas interned at Xavier Delcour, back then something of a sensation in the realm of sharp, gothic menswear. “That was an amazing internship,” says Nicolas. “Xavier was adorable. Every day at the exact same time we would get two beautiful chocolates on a white plate. So chic.” We wonder out loud what happened to Xavier, who seems to have all but disappeared from fashion. “I heard he was in Ibiza for a while. I’ve tried to find him, just to say hi.” Nicolas’s next internship was at Own, the label run by teachers of his at La Cambre who had previously worked for Maison Martin Margiela. “And then I did my ‘famous’ internship at Balenciaga and I never returned to school.”

Balenciaga, at the time headed by Nicolas Ghesquière, was the place where everybody in fashion wanted to be. “We were in a tiny studio in a beautiful building in the sixth. There was Nicolas’s office, then precollection on one side, Natacha Ramsay and Allegria Torassa on the other side, Michael Rider, Alistair Carr, whom I love, and Emmanuel Morlet on knitwear. It was a dream team of amazing designers. I had a tiny desk, not more than the size of this table. I was 24 and I just worked. Observing, working, going back and forth to my friends in Brussels over the weekend.”

Ghesquière left Balenciaga in 2012. On the day it was announced, Nicolas Di Felice got a phone call from London, inviting him to work with Phoebe Philo at Céline. “I went to meet Phoebe and I liked her. They had a beauti­ful studio in London that looked like a little house. She looked really inspiring: she’d just come back from the gym, so beautiful, hot, sharp, smoking a pack of cigarettes. That’s the kind of woman I like, you know?” But Nicolas stayed at Balenciaga to work with new designer Alexander Wang, then moved to Dior under Raf Simons. “I did that for a year and a half. For me, Raf is one of the best: so good, so inspiring. He always wants to know what you’re wearing, what music you’re listening to. But Dior as a company is so huge. You make your drawings, you draw, draw, draw, which at school I was terrible at, and you send your drawings to another atelier to make the garment. I learnt how to draw at Dior, but I didn’t love it. I need to drape, I need to feel the fabric, I need to sit in the atelier and work on the dress. So when I got the offer from Louis Vuitton, I went.”

Courrèges, founded in 1961 by André Courrèges, was fashion’s answer to the world’s obsession with futurism. Courrèges embraced plastic and vinyl as bona fide fabrics for clothing, and shiny white as its signature shade. While Pierre Cardin went both weird and mainstream, and Paco Rabanne was all sparkly and metallic, Courrèges made hip ’60s fashion for Parisian girls and women. Its flagship store in Paris’s eighth arrondissement still exists: all white walls, white carpet and some funny rounded corners, like the inside of a space ship. André and his wife, Coqueline Courrèges, sold it in 2011, and in 2018 the Pinault family – billionaire owners of fashion conglomerate Kering – bought a majority stake in the brand.

“Of course I knew Courrèges very well,” says Nicolas, who started there in the autumn of 2020. “You’d come across it all the time in the fashion archives where we’d do our research, and in magazines like old ‘Harper’s Bazaar’ and old ‘Vogue’. Crazy things, really clear and easy to get, super simple, geometric shapes.” Until 2010, Coqueline Courrèges oversaw the creative process. Since then, several creative directors have tried to reanimate the legacy of the label without ever really succeeding. What made Nicolas able to electrify Courrèges from the day he arrived? “You never know,” he says. “I had a great start. I had the chance to meet people who understood what I wanted to say. I wanted Courrèges to be something simple and easy to get. Wearable, and for a young customer. I started in the middle of the pandemic, and I’d had nine months off before I started. I had always been told that you need to have the first two collections ready before you start, which I did, because once you’re in it, it’s like you’re in a spin dryer and there’s no time to think.” His clothes are a bit fetishistic, for women but now also with a newly launched menswear line. “That’s the magic of clothes,” he says about the hint of perversity – leather, rubber, latex, flared jeans, a flash of nudity. “I would never pretend to revolutionise fashion, but my skill is to make clothes that look nice, that make you look fit, and that you can stuff into your backpack and they don’t wrinkle, so that you don’t look like you’re having a crazy day.” The latter gives his garments that pristine French touch which is also something of a Courrèges signature.

There’s a universe of excitement around Nicolas’s Courrèges, from their notoriously fun raves to the cute campaigns and a festive vibe in the brand’s flagship store that Nicolas had re-decorated by Bernard Dubois, a friend from La Cambre in Brussels, but that still looks like a shop André and Coqueline would approve of. “My team is amazing,” Nicolas says. “A really colourful cast, lots of young people. They’re a source of inspiration in itself, the way they show up in the studio in a tiny pink crop top. The other day my colleague was wearing one of our trouser prototypes, but as a top, with one boob out. They’re so different from when I started at Balenciaga; we were there in the office until midnight. Most people don’t want to do that anymore. And I understand that. We all work a lot. I feel bad when I send my team a text on the weekend.”

The next evening I drop by the Jean Paul Gaultier design studio. From our atelier on the seventh floor we have a glorious view over northern Paris. Night falls. Nicolas is kneeling in front of a tall Dutch model, scissors and pins in hand, working on a powder-pink dress with a corset top. “My first bias-cut dress,” jokes Nicolas as he’s draping a train of fabric diagonally onto the model. It’s five days until the couture show, and there are photographs of the line-up of the collection on the wall, but none of the actual clothes seem to be ready. Once the pink dress is sent back to the atelier, one floor below, a new model arrives in a brown pair of towering trousers and an organza top that’s sculpted on her body. At some point there are three people pulling on the fabric, and Nicolas chops off the bit that’s sticking out. “Voila, this extra stuff we don’t need. Better, no?” he says. Once they’re happy with each outfit, it will be completely re-made in the final fabric.

There’s a team of five people around. One man, sitting behind a table, is only in charge of the accessories and jewellery. Two women liaise between Nicolas and the many seamstresses elsewhere in the building. One designer used to work at Courrèges until he got headhunted for a job in London. “He was making three times more money there,” Nicolas says. “And now he’s back with us. Isn’t that nice?” And there’s Roderick Buijs, a 34-year-old designer of Dutch origin who is Nicolas’s right-hand man, and also his boyfriend.

After Roderick finished art school in Arnhem in 2013, he moved to Paris, hoping to find a job. He started as a paid intern at Balmain, then moved to Dior, just around the time when Nicolas started at Dior. They didn’t work together, but they struck up a friendship. Roderick moved to the womenswear design team at Louis Vuitton, and a little later, so did Nicolas, effectively becoming Roderick’s boss. “We worked together super well,” says Roderick, or, as Nicolas calls him, Roro. After five years, Nico left Vuitton to enter his year of contractual finger twitching before he could start at Courrèges, and the world went into lockdown. “Suddenly we didn’t see each other every day anymore,” says Roro, “but after a while we started doing fun things together, hanging out in the park, making long walks. Then one day, we kissed, which was a bit odd, to suddenly start kissing with your best friend. The next day we saw each other again, nothing was mentioned at first until, after an hour or so, I said, shouldn’t we talk about that kiss? What was that?”

They’ve been together now for four years, and recently Roro changed jobs, so he’s now at Courrèges too. They’re working on Gaultier together, they also live together.

Tonight they’re puzzling through a thousand and one details for next Wednesday’s show. Popstar Arca is one of their models. “I think she should wear this look,” says Nicolas, pointing at the wall. “It’s sexy on her.” Lou, the trans model that’s just arrived for her fitting, “shouldn’t be in the look with the veil; she’s too beautiful, you want to see her face,” according to Nicolas. She cannot try on her shoes – they’re still being made in Italy. In a way, these couture fittings remind me of what it is to make music: the band can prepare and rehearse as much as they can, but the actual music will be made live on stage. That’s what this couture show feels like; live fashion, with clothes that are made pretty much on the spot or at the very last minute.

Alas, I can’t be at the show, so I ask my colleague writer Angelo Flaccavento to take over for this bit:

On June 26, 2024, the usual crowd gathers at 325 rue Saint-Martin, in the upper Marais, in front of Jean Paul Gaultier’s headquarters. That’s what inevitably happens at every Gaultier show, even after Jean Paul himself retired in 2021 and a rotation of guest designers started offering their one-off interpretation of the Gaultier code, in haute couture form. This season’s turn is for Nicolas Di Felice, whose crudely reductionist, sexually charged take on modernism has put Courrèges back on the fashion map.

Getting in is surprisingly smooth. In the past, it’s been riotous at times. Inside, the scene at the massive staircase leading up to the hall on the first floor where shows are held is another Gaultier tradition: poseurs, TikTokers and influencers taking selfies and filming stories on the steps, or in front of the huge mirror at the top of the first flight of stairs.

The main room has undergone a Di Felice makeover: glaring clinical white everywhere, with the stuccoes covered up and sharp angles in lieu of curves, giving the hall a vaguely space-age feel. The layout of the venue is rather labyrinthine, with a very narrow catwalk opening up into a sort of “pool” at the end. I’m one of the first guests to get in, and I dutifully take my seat at the beginning of the catwalk, in the narrowest point. Opposite me, the American theatre producer, king of narcissists and avid couture collector, Jordan Roth, is talking and posing, enjoying a sociable moment with other poseurs. A few seats down, Nicolas’s parents look radiant, talking with my colleague Serena Tibaldi, the fashion critic at ‘la Repubblica’.

Intrigued by the scene, I stand up and join the conversation, in Italian, congrat­ulating the Di Felices on their son’s talent. A full hour of gruesome waiting precedes the show. At some point the place is like a steam room (another inevitability at a Gaultier show).

As the first model parades down the runway, face covered by a veil attached to the frame of a pair of glasses, it’s immediately apparent this is going to be something. The merging of Gaultier’s Parisian cheekiness and Di Felice’s own taste for raw, sex-charged linearity translates into an unexpected take on the label’s heritage, not a single conical breast or guêpière in sight. Instead, Di Felice, who is firmly averse to useless decoration, uses hook-and-eye closures as functional embroidery that allows one to drape pieces, or to open them at will. It makes for a mixture of sharpness and abandon that feels energetic: dress enticing undress, with Gaultier’s trademark eroticism given an angular spin. Gaultier himself, seated front row next to Catherine Deneuve, looks satisfied.

Greeting guests and press after the show, Nicolas looks exhausted and tense, yet relieved. Before my eyes, he meets legendary fashion critic Suzy Menkes for the first time, looking emotional as he shakes her hand. In the background, a glimpse of Di Felice’s parents looking all smiles and pride gives the scene an enjoyably domestic feel. (AF)

Afterwards Nicolas went straight back to work at Courrèges, back on his knees with rolls of fabric, pins and scissors at hand. He wants his next women’s collection to be well underway before he takes off to Greece and Ibiza for the holidays.

In all the frenzy he’s also found time to find a nice new apartment for a friend – she’s going for a viewing today. Nicolas’s favourite pastime is searching for real estate. “I always have alerts out for four or five people. Two friends want to move in together, so they’re looking for something bigger in their price range; another friend wants to move into my neighbourhood. I love that. I’ve always had the best with luck finding apartments, for others and for myself.” It’s emblematic of Nicolas’s magic problem-solving skills. “When I found the place where we live now, in the 19th, it was advertised on the worst site, the pictures were super ugly. I went to see it anyway, and it’s the best! We have the entire floor, with a 360° view over Paris and the park.” Nicolas says that it’s the view that matters most. “I’ve always said, I’d rather have ten square metres with an amazing view than a bigger place with no view. I don’t like to have much stuff anyway.”

Pardon the analogy with his job: Courrèges isn’t the biggest house in today’s fashion constellation, but its prospects are good. In the rave reviews for his Gaultier couture show there were several hints at what could be next for Nicolas and so I ask him about the speculation. “First of all, and I think I told you this already, I’m someone who is fidel,” he says. “I feel like we rebuilt Courrèges from scratch, four years ago. The shops, the new perfumes, the packaging, the logo, the concept of the shows. I’m not going to leave this house for something that isn’t crazy better. I think it’s amazing what we’re doing at Courrèges. The sales are good. I’m proud. I hate the expression, but we’re growing with double digits every year. The family believes in me, so I’m not going to quit that for some huge job. I don’t want something bigger, I just want to learn more, gain more skills, feel more freedom.”