André Courrèges obituary

A radical future was in fashion for a while in the 1960s, its girls gleaming ethereal in silver and white. The lead designer of this brave – and brief – new world was André Courrèges, who has died aged 92.

He was not an absolute beginner when he launched the look, although its success depended on his rapport with young people. He had been born in Pau, in the French Basque country (and kept the accent); studied as a civil engineer keen on architecture and textiles; and served as a pilot in the French air force during the second world war, recalling especially the sky-blue flannelette of the pyjamas issued to US forces who landed in France in 1944 – such good cloth.

After the war he pursued design in Paris and joined a minor fashion house. His hero was the couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga; Courrèges volunteered to work for free as his apprentice, an offer conveyed to Balenciaga by the smugglers who carried his designs between France and Spain and passed the letter to the boss. Courrèges admired the master’s tailoring – Balenciaga sculpted simple, strong female forms in cloth – and his taste; they both collected 17th-century religious artefacts. Courrèges joined the firm’s tailoring atelier in 1951 – “I paid for my admiration and interest with hard work” – and was later sent to its branch houses in Spain, to take responsibility for the firm’s younger clients.

Courrèges waited respectfully until Balenciaga declared that his pupil was ready to set up his own salon and offered him support and finance. The Maison de Courrèges opened in Paris in 1961, but it was another three years before his ascetic scissors and the prevailing mode were in alignment. Besides Balenciaga’s carving in cloth, Courrèges was influenced by 1920s Russian constructivism, with its candour about how things were made, although he used fine fabrics that the Russians could never aspire to, double-sided wools and heavy twills. He emphasised stitchery with welted seams, calling them the “pencil strokes in the sketch”.

If his clothes had been created in deep colours, and cut to fit the contours of an adult woman, their debt to Balenciaga would have been more obvious. But for Courrèges, the ideal figure was that of a girl whose dresses hung directly from her shoulders, whose curvelessness needed no darts, whose short skirts exposed her thighs, whose feet were free to skip. Courrèges model girls hopped and jumped in baby bootees (called gogo boots and made in white kid or plastic rather than knitted by grandmère). They were cute in bonnets that tied under the chin, wore huge joke sunglasses and trousers – or rather parallel tubes, like kids’ leggings, joined at the top, and all in infant department pastel shades. Chanel accused Courrèges of preferring toddlers to women.

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Courrèges’s 1964-65 collections were unnervingly novel. His models, despite their white gloves and stiff helmets, seemed to be females of the future. Their presexuality (it was never the media-touted unisexuality) matched the aseptic dream of the technology of the time, especially when Courrèges used the clear plastic Rhodoid — a cellulose acetate made from vegetable fibres, not petroleum — for details. The 1960s fantasised a lot about a designed future, and Courrèges contributed to the mood with his moon girl look, and then his space age collection.

He had always liked the cleanliness of white, loving traditional sportswear and limewashed Spanish villages, and eagerly adopted a new bleach chemistry supplied to the textile industry in the 1960s with a blueing agent that dazzled the eye into seeing a brilliant fluorescent white. He combined this with metallics, armouring his models with actual metal brassieres as well as sequins. Andy Warhol said his “clothes are so beautiful, everyone should look the same, dressed in silver”. He was a gifted experimenter in fibre, whether synthetic – pastel wigs in Dynel – or natural. The manufacturer Bianchini Férier produced his designs for embroidered silks and cottons, sometimes incorporating Rhodoid. His textiles and tailoring were not easy to copy, but his ideas were, despite his strict control of manufacture and licensed distribution.

Courrèges seemed symbiotic with the 1960s, and, with his sudden global success, sold half his couture house and all his perfume rights to L’Oréal to fund expansion, with a new silver salon, a venture into mass-market manufacture and a factory in Pau. What he had not predicted was how soon his short, shiny future look would be outdated by a taste for the soft and natural that twined its way out of the hippy aesthetic of the later 60s, when Woodstock music festival replaced outer space as the preferred dream venue.

Within a few years, only those aspects of Courrèges’s work that derived from sport (he personally played or followed rugby, motor racing and the Basque game pelota) remained relevant; he was awarded the contract to design uniforms for the 1972 Olympics. He would have stayed ahead of fashion (we now wear sportswear for much of the day) if he had transferred to full-time sportswear design, but he kept his couture house, although his spare style was isolated in the flamboyant Paris of the 1980s.

L’Oréal ceded the label to the Japanese ready-to-wear firm Itokin in 1982, and Courrèges regained control in 1993. Jean-Charles de Castelbajac designed two collections for Courrèges in 1993-94, and the house revived original 1960s concepts for retro appeal, including the gogo boots. Courrèges took back his perfume business in 1996 and produced a celebratory fragrance, 2020, but the date was no longer a distant fantasy. His more practical predictions about clothing had already come true, including those he made in a 1982 book about a future of gym- and sports-toned bodies in tight-fitted stretch fabrics and knits.

He was already suffering from Parkinson’s disease, and retired from fashion and his ventures in property development, cars and food. He vented his creativity instead in sculpture and painting, and had several exhibitions.

In 1967 he married his assistant, later design partner, Coqueline Barrière, who had also been a Balenciaga trainee. She and their daughter, Marie, survive him.