Before the moon landing, before the future became retro, there was Courrèges.
White boots. Impossible hemlines. Women moving as if gravity had suddenly become optional.
From May 14 to November 1, 2026, the Fondation Maeght turns back the clock to one of fashion’s most explosive moments with Peter Knapp: The Era of Courrèges, an exhibition dedicated to the photographer who captured the birth of a new woman—and a new idea of modernity.
In 1965, André Courrèges detonated the fashion system. His vision was radical: strip away decoration, reject convention, and rebuild the silhouette from the ground up. Fashion became architecture. Geometry became seduction. The future arrived dressed in white.
Peter Knapp was there.
Not as a witness but as an accomplice.
Given complete creative freedom, Knapp photographed Courrèges’ revolutionary collection as if it belonged to another dimension. Published in ELLE in March 1965, his images transformed models into weightless creatures suspended somewhere between Earth and outer space. Bodies no longer walked; they hovered.
At the heart of the exhibition, those photographs still feel strangely contemporary. Around them orbit archival materials, original garments, documents and memories from an era when everything seemed possible and every discipline—art, fashion, dance, architecture—was speaking the same futuristic language.
The Fondation Maeght was the perfect stage for this collision. Opened in 1964 as France’s first foundation dedicated to modern and contemporary art, it became a meeting point for artists, dreamers and visionaries. Courrèges loved the place. Peter Knapp returned to it repeatedly, photographing fashion among Giacometti sculptures and modern masterpieces, blurring the line between exhibition space and fashion set.
More than a retrospective, The Era of Courrèges captures a moment when optimism was a design principle and the future looked astonishingly clean.
The clothes were modern.
The photographs were modern.
The dream still is.
