Andre Courreges and the Moon Girl

Humans did not walk on the moon until 1969, but their imminent arrival and the space exploration during the 1960s contributed a lot to a new way of interpreting and designing fashion. It was a period when designers of both clothes and textiles celebrated modernity and scientific progress. Many of the decade’s designers were influenced by space, but the one who had a stronger vision about the relation between future and fashion, was the French designer André Courrèges.

He opened his House in 1961, after he worked for ten years under Cristóbal Balenciaga from which he learned the innovative approach to design. One of the designer’s first innovations was to replace the LBD with the little white dress and he started to use futuristic fabrics, including PVC and vinyl. The year 1964 was marked by the Courrèges Moon Girl, the way that Vogue was describing the spring collection: ‘Courrèges clearly dreams of moon parties’. The white and silver collection with sheer chiffon tops thigh-high skirts in geometric shapes was central to the space-race fashion of the mid-1960s. The flat square-toed white boots became as well internationally adopted.

The Space Age collection unveiled architectural shape clothes like double-buttoned coats with contrasting trim, well-tailored shirts or short-sleeves mini-dresses with dropped waist. Vivid shades of pink, orange, green and navy complemented the designer’s bold white and silver. The accessories were made to accentuate the clothes by oversized, white, tennis-ball sunglasses or goggles, gloves and helmet-shaped hats.

Courrèges visionary approach to fashion was represented by minimalistic geometric lines, using as less decorations and ornamentations as possible. 

Though, his most characteristic symbol, often covering the dresses and bare body parts was the ‘youthful daisy’, Courrèges’s fashion emphasized technologically advanced synthetic materials like shiny, wet-look PVC, easy-care acrylics and polyesters.