Andre Courreges, the French fashion designer, who symbolized stylistic freedom and aggravated the dispute over whether he was first with the miniskirt, died on Jan. 7 at his home outside Paris, in Neuilly-sur-Seine. He was 92.
He had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for 30 years and was one of the most influential couturiers of his time, Courreges won fame for fitting out his models in attire that seemed to suggest not past eras or conventions, but a new up-to-date esthetic, representative of the space age.
In his most productive and creative years, the 1960s, he garbed women in clothing that suggested slipping the surly bonds of earth and boldly going where few costume creators had gone before. He was also interested in providing high-quality ready-to-wear clothing, and at one time, his name adorned more than 120 shops across the globe.
According to the British newspaper, “Courreges was the inventor of the miniskirt: at least in his eyes and those of the French fashion fraternity… The argument came down to high fashion vs. street fashion and to France versus Britain — there’s no conclusive evidence either way.”
Courreges had firm ideas on what constituted fashion liberation.
“A woman’s body must be hard and free,” he told a French magazine editor when she came for a fitting in 1965. “Not soft and harnessed. The harness — the girdle and bra — is the chain of the slave.”
Courreges’s clients included former U.S. first lady Jacqueline Kennedy and actresses Catherine Deneuve, Brigitte Bardot and Audrey Hepburn and Nancy Reagan.
Andre Courreges was born March 9, 1923, in Pau, France, in a Basque region of Pyrenees. He showed an early interest in art, but his father directed him into engineering. He was reportedly a pilot in the French military during the Second World War and a civil engineer early in his career.
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