Nicolas Di Felice

Nicolas Di Felice is a Belgian designer who spent five and a half years remaking Courrèges, the Paris house founded by André Courrèges in 1961, before stepping down as its creative director on 24 March 2026. His tenure took a house that had cycled through several unsuccessful revivals in the previous decade and turned it into one of the most closely watched names in Paris womenswear, built on vinyl, hard geometry and a nightlife-inflected idea of the body. As of September 2026 he has not been named to a new post; his departure produced persistent but unconfirmed press speculation that he might take over the vacant creative directorship at Alaïa. (A Shaded View on Fashion; L'Officiel USA)

From Charleroi's post-industrial edges to Ghesquière's studio

Di Felice was born on 1 July 1983 in Charleroi, a former coal and steel city in Wallonia with no fashion industry to speak of. (Wikidata; Wikipédia) By his own account, his interest in clothes began not with fashion but with a Belgian music-television programme, where he fixated on the costumes worn by touring bands rather than the music itself; he made music of his own on the side for years afterward. That interest carried him to La Cambre, the Brussels art school whose fashion department has supplied a disproportionate number of designers now leading French houses, from which he graduated in 2008. (Dazed; Wikipédia)

Graduation led directly to Balenciaga, where Nicolas Ghesquière hired him as a junior stylist in 2008; Di Felice worked his way up to designer over the following six years. He then spent several months in the tailoring studio at Dior under Raf Simons in 2014, before rejoining Ghesquière — by then creative director of womenswear at Louis Vuitton — as a senior designer on tailored pieces, a post he held for five years. (Wikipédia; 032c) One lesson from that period stayed with him as a working method: Ghesquière's insistence that "if you want a straight line, it better be really straight," a standard of technical precision Di Felice later applied to a far smaller house of his own. (032c)

"Never copy the past": rebuilding Courrèges

Courrèges named Di Felice creative director in September 2020, his first solo appointment after twelve years spent designing for other people's visions. He later described finding a handwritten sign inside the house, left by André Courrèges's wife and longtime creative partner Coqueline, reading "never copy the past" — a directive he took as licence to study the founder's 1960s archive for its underlying logic rather than for silhouettes to reproduce. (Wallpaper*) His debut, Autumn/Winter 2021's I Can Feel Your Heartbeat, was presented as a film shot at La Station – Gare des Mines, a former industrial site on the edge of Paris used as a party venue, rather than staged as a physical show — partly a pandemic-era concession, but one that also announced his real subject: club culture, and the freedom of dressing for a night spent dancing rather than for a red carpet. (FashionUnited)

That vocabulary held for the rest of his tenure: body-conscious cutting, cut-outs, short hemlines and, most visibly, vinyl — the material André Courrèges had experimented with in the 1960s and which Di Felice reintroduced as a recurring runway and retail material rather than a period reference. His reissued vinyl jackets drew public approval from Marc Jacobs and became one of the pieces most associated with his Courrèges, worn by Hailey Bieber and Dua Lipa among others. (W Magazine)

Alongside the runway, he rebuilt the house's infrastructure: the collection calendar expanded from four to six releases a year with the addition of menswear, an archival Rééditions line reissued past silhouettes in current fabrications, and Courrèges opened boutiques in the Marais and on the Left Bank in Paris and in New York, alongside four new fragrances. (Wikipédia)

Beyond the runway: stages, clubs and a guest couture

Di Felice's Courrèges reached past its own runway. He designed stage costumes for Beyoncé's Renaissance World Tour, and ran Courrèges Club, a recurring series of music events staged under the house's name that turned his club-culture references into an actual social space rather than a styling cue. (W Magazine)

In March 2024, Jean Paul Gaultier named him its next guest couturier, continuing a programme of one-season guest directorships that had already brought in Chitose Abe, Glenn Martens, Olivier Rousteing and Simone Rocha. Di Felice, who has said Gaultier was one of the only fashion figures anyone in his hometown recognised by name, treated the commission as licence to be more openly theatrical than his day job at Courrèges allowed. (Dazed)

For Autumn/Winter 2025 he collaborated with the artist Dan Colen, building a collection around Colen's confetti paintings and introducing what he called the "one-minute silhouette" — a single rectangle of fabric that wraps the body in one gesture — while elevating a utilitarian detail, the press stud, into visible decoration. (Wallpaper*)

A fifth-anniversary exit

Di Felice's final Courrèges show, presented in Paris in March 2026 to mark five years at the house, was built around the idea of "24 hours in the life of a Courrèges woman" and reprised the sleek, body-conscious line that had defined his tenure. Days later, on 24 March 2026, he announced his departure in a brief Instagram post: "What an amazing adventure! I still remember with so much affection my very first day in this beautiful house, where everything had to be rebuilt." Courrèges's own statement said he was leaving to concentrate on personal projects; Di Felice added thanks to the house's owners, "François Pinault and François-Henri Pinault," of the Pinault family holding company Artémis. (W Magazine; Hypebeast)

Courrèges named its next creative director, Drew Henry, on 30 March 2026, effective that May, with no interim leadership announced in between. (FashionUnited) Di Felice himself has named no next project; the Alaïa speculation that followed his exit remains, as of this writing, unconfirmed by either side. (L'Officiel USA)

Reading and dating a Di Felice Courrèges

Three revivals of Courrèges preceded him in less than a decade — Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant from 2015, then Yolanda Zobel from 2018 — so a garment carrying the house's name from that 2015–2020 window is not automatically his work. The Rééditions line complicates dating further in the opposite direction, since it deliberately puts pieces resembling André Courrèges's 1960s originals back into circulation in present-day fabrications. On a genuine Di Felice-era garment, the giveaway is usually construction rather than motif: vinyl or vinyl-effect panelling used structurally rather than as trim, stretch jersey worked as a second skin, and a boxier, more geometric take on the house's original hemlines than Meyer, Vaillant or Zobel attempted. Season and collection notes remain the most reliable way to separate an actual 1960s silhouette from its later Réédition, since the two are designed to be mistaken for one another. Anything carrying the Courrèges name from May 2026 onward belongs to Drew Henry rather than to Di Felice, whatever residual branding a resale listing attaches to it.

Di Felice's Courrèges chapter is bounded cleanly by two Instagram posts five and a half years apart, but the method he leaves behind — treating a small, thinly resourced heritage house as raw material for an entirely new sensibility rather than as a set of motifs to repeat — is likely to outlast the specific silhouettes he built it from. Wherever his next collection appears, it will be judged by the same standard he set at Courrèges: whether a straight line is actually straight.

References

• A Shaded View on Fashion. "Courrèges announces the departure of Nicolas Di Felice." 24 March 2026.
• L'Officiel USA. "Nicolas Di Felice Exits Courrèges After a Five-Year Tenure." 2026.
• Wikidata. "Nicolas Di Felice." Entry Q117825475.
• Wikipédia. "Nicolas Di Felice."
• Alexander Fury (Dazed). "Nicolas Di Felice is taking over Jean Paul Gaultier." 18 March 2024.
• 032c. "Shaping Courrèges: Farewell, Nicolas Di Felice." March 2026.
• Wallpaper*. "How Nicolas Di Felice is taking Courrèges into the future." 2025.
• FashionUnited. "Nicolas Di Felice presents first collection for Courrèges." 3 March 2021.
• W Magazine. "Nicolas Di Felice Leaves Courrèges After Five Years as Artistic Director." March 2026.
• Hypebeast. "Nicolas Di Felice Steps Down as Artistic Director of Courrèges." March 2026.
• FashionUnited. "Drew Henry named new creative director of Courrèges." 30 March 2026.