Dress, Courrèges

• Courrèges

• gift of Madame Léon Gischia
• Spring-Summer 1968
• Organdy and cotton satin, underlay in polyamide jersey, satin stitch embroidery
• GAL 1998.44.2
• Palais Galliera, musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris

André Courrèges (b. 1923) founded his couture house in 1961 and entered fashion history in 1965 with a fundamental redefinition of the female silhouette. The 'Courrèges bombshell', as the press of the time termed it, bore no relation to the past.

The couturier put knees on show, did away with the waist, hips and bosom, and dressed legs with pants.The Courrèges woman was a return to the codes of childhood, with no qualms about combining long white socks with flat shoes. This dress, worn by the wife of painter Léon Gischia and shown on model Penelope Tree in the April 1968 Vogue USA, used mockery as its aesthetic key. As short as a child's dress, it is decorated with a trompe l'oeil two-piece swimsuit, while its opaque organdy underlay is embroidered with blue Op Art circles.