During the epoch of space age, Cardin offered some of the couture's most outré designs, offered like so much during the 1960s as provocative hypothesis rather than empirical prototype. Knapp worked as closely with Ungaro as Coqueline Courrèges did with her husband.Ī decade older than Courrèges or Ungaro, Pierre Cardin began his own business in 1957 after apprenticeships at several couture houses. Essential to the success of the young house as unique fabrics designed exclusively for him by his partner Sonia Knapp. He was certainly Courrèges's disciple during these years but his suits and dresses in childlike flaring shapes were gentle and more ingratiating.
He also promised a radical departure from couture business-as-usual, pledging that there would be no evening clothes in this first collection, since he did not believe in them. He outfitted his models, instead, in flat Mary Jane slippers, or white boots that enhanced the graphic rectangularity of his silhouette.Īfter six years working for Balenciaga, Emanuel Ungaro assisted Courrèges for one year before opening his own doors in 1965. For him, high heels were as absurd as the bound feet of Asian women. He offered what might be considered fashion manifestos. Yet what he produced could not be easily transferred to the workplace, although his clothes and mass-manufactured imitations were seen on streets around the world. "They belong to the present, the future" (21 May, p.
"Working women have always interested me the most," Courrèges said in Life Magazine in 1965. Reaching his meridian in 19, he advocated very short skirts as well as pants for all occasions, at the time a highly controversial proposition. Courrèges inveighed against the traditional appurtenances of femininity and foreswore the curvilinear. In a Courrèges suit a woman herself became a Brancusi-like distillation, an avatar of streamlined strength. His fabrics were flat, tailored wools, more intractable than what ready-to-wear was espousing. Courrèges used white a great deal, exploiting its myriad and contradictory connotations of sterility and/or purity as well as all-inclusive spectrum-spanning synergy.Ĭourrèges's work surely owed a debt to London ready-to-wear, but ever present in his work was the active, constructing hand of the couturier. He preferred a restricted palette of monochromes and pastels, and was partial to aggressive checks and stripes. His dresses, suits, and trouser suits might be fitted, semi-fitted, or tubular, but they presented a bold and graphic silhouette, delineated as interlocking geometries by welt seaming and strategic piping.
Vintage Medicine Cabinet Styles and Charming Décor Ideasīefore turning to fashion, Courrèges had dallied in both architecture and engineering, and this was reflected in his clothes.
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How to Identify Antique Desk Styles With Ease.Exploring Retro Space Art and Its Inspirations."Things have never been the same since Courrèges had his explosion," Yves Saint Laurent said in a 1966 Women's Wear Daily (9 December, p. It took him but a couple of years to find his own feet, and when he did he kicked out the props from under establishment couture. Courrèges was a member of Balenciaga's couture house for ten years before beginning his own business in 1961 in partnership with his wife Coqueline, who had also worked for Balenciaga. André Courrèges was perhaps the most creative. Space age fashion created a brusque and frequently shocking brave new universe within the 1960s fashion cosmos.Īs a design movement, space age fashion was above all a French phenomenon, promulgated mostly by men in their thirties who had been trained in the old-guard Paris couture, but saw the need to refute some of their pedigree. Frills and flounces were eschewed in favor of a new, hard-edged and streamlined silhouette that also incorporated industrial materials. But it was hardly necessary to don an actual flight suit to be part of the styles that came to be known as "space age." Sleek as a fuselage, space age fashion emulated the aerodynamic simplicity and severity of a space capsule. In the April 1965 issue of Harper's Bazaar, Richard Avedon photographed British fashion model Jean Shrimpton wearing an astronaut's helmet and flight uniform. Space exploration's grip on the popular consciousness during the 1960s contributed to a new fashion philosophy, becoming a pool of design inspiration an analog to speculation about a radically transformed future that preoccupied the sensibilities of the decade. Humans did not walk on the moon until 1969, but their imminent arrival was slotted on the world's calendar from the very beginning of the decade.
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