Walking into the all-white Courrèges showroom where Drew Henry was putting the finishing touches to his first collection, the first thing that caught the eye was a pumpkin-colored hat on a corner table.
It was so shapeless, you wondered if someone had sat on it. It was emphatically not the kind of thing you could picture on the mood board of his predecessor Nicolas Di Felice, who in the space of five years revved up the brand with a cocktail of precision cutting and a mostly monochromatic palette.
Designed by hat supremo Jean Barthet, the cloche-like creation was one of the surprises Henry found in the archive. He was digging into the beginnings of the house, before founder André Courrèges dropped his landmark spring 1964 Space Age collection.
“Trying to find original imagery of that stuff is tricky, and when we got everything here, I just unpacked all of it, and seeing it all in the room, laid out — the amount of color was amazing,” he recalled.
But back to that hat. “There’s a humor to it,” he said. “I like that it’s a bit f—ed up, and I think for me, that’s something that translates a lot into the clothes and the way I work.”
Henry’s show at the Palais de Tokyo on Wednesday captured that upbeat spirit, with a collection that took a freewheeling approach to brand codes like ribbed knits, vinyl jackets and the ubiquitous A-line dress.
He zhuzhed up lean jackets and coats with raw edges, metallic logos and thick belts that sat high on the waist, and paired them with baggy pants in an array of zesty colors.
Born in South Africa, Henry graduated from Central Saint Martins and is best known for his work with Phoebe Philo, both at Celine and under her own label. That experience showed in solid commercial pieces including lean tunics, fluid jumpsuits and body-skimming knits.
On his mood board were personal style heroes such as James Baldwin, Tracy Chapman and Cher. He feels their devil-may-care attitude chimes with the original spirit of Courrèges. “There was something quite punky about it, and I love that,” Henry mused.
He’d like to explore that lightness for himself, so he sprinkled in psychedelic touches like cartoony floral bra tops, cage jumpsuits dotted with tufty flowers, and a pair of HotPants with a cutout hole over one butt cheek. As for that A-line dress? He flipped it backward and made it unisex.
Henry certainly gets full marks for ballsiness. This confident, if imperfect, debut suggests he has plenty more ideas up his sleeve, but that squishy hat? Forget it.
