In the hands of Azzedine Alaïa, a dress is so much more than
stitched fabric. It’s an exaltation of the female form. A technical
masterpiece. A unique vision. Over lunch in Paris, fashion’s ultimate
independent finally comes to terms with his singular legacy.
You
never know who you might run into at Azzedine Alaïa’s headquarters in
the Marais section of Paris. On a Friday in December, there’s the
fashion photographer Jean-Baptiste Mondino, shopping for a navy A-line
minidress as a gift for his wife. Azzedine “has a real sense of the
woman’s body,” Mondino says. “And women know that.”
Alaïa walks into the ground-floor shop, as he often does, pleased to see his old friend. “Stay for lunch,” he insists.
Mondino demurs, “I have to work.”
Carla Sozzani, the founder of the
10 Corso Como
gallery, boutique and hotel in Milan and Alaïa’s longtime friend and
style consultant since 2000, is there too. So is the French photographer
Sarah Moon, who recounts how she originally went to see Alaïa in 1977
at his first studio, on the rue de Bellechasse, because she’d heard he
made Marlene Dietrich’s suits. “No, my dear, it was Garbo,” he corrects
her. “I dressed Garbo.”
After much chatter and joke telling, everyone but Mondino moves into
Alaïa’s large open kitchen for lunch. In fact, there are 22 around the
immense old glass-topped garden table, including the painter Christophe
von Weyhe, Alaïa’s retail manager and life partner of more than 30
years; several company assistants; and some friends of friends. “It’s
always like this, lunch and dinner,” Alaïa says, as plates of roast
chicken, puréed carrots and mashed potatoes are served.
Alaïa is
fashion’s enigma. The Tunisian-born designer has officially been in
business for nearly 35 years, and he’s been privately making clothes to
order for chic women since the 1960s, yet he still has what would
qualify as a cult following. His company remains small — about $63
million a year in an industry where many brands earn hundreds of
millions in sales annually. Unlike most designers today, who carry the
title of creative director and serve more as managers than couturiers,
Alaïa cuts his own clothing patterns and sews the samples himself, each
stitch exactly where and how it should be. Most important, through the
wizardry of perfectly placed seams and stretch knits, Alaïa’s clothes
nip, tuck and hoist to maximum effect. The top model Naomi Campbell, who
has known Alaïa since she was 16 and calls him “papa,” describes his
designs as “almost magical. No other dress can make a woman look and
feel as good as an Alaïa dress because it cinches a woman’s body
perfectly.”
Alaïa has always made the clothes he wants to make, at
his rhythm, showing them when it pleases him, selling only to stores he
likes and delivering them when he wants. Years ago, when he decided
he’d had enough of the Paris show schedule, he simply opted to present
his collection months after everyone else, and then soon after, stopped
showing altogether. Alaïa simply plays by rules of his own making,
rather than ones created by the fashion industry. And yet retailers
can’t help but love him. His clothes appeal to a broad range of women,
from “true collectors” to young customers “investing in pieces that will
stay in their wardrobe forever but somehow always seems modern,” says
Daniella Vitale, C.O.O. and executive vice president of Barneys New
York, which has carried Alaïa since the early 1980s. Alaïa “has an
uncanny ability to bridge all of it seamlessly. Very few designers have
that capability.” His collection, she adds, “is one of the most
successful brands we have in the store.”
Katie Grand, the
influential stylist and editor in chief of Love magazine, had Alaïa make
her wedding dress, a brown snakeskin number with a fitted bodice and
short flared skirt, in 2009. “He tortured me for a few months,” she
recalls with a laugh. “The first question he asked was, ‘What size are
you going to be at your wedding?’ ” When she told him, he explained that
the dress wasn’t the sort that could be altered at the last minute. “He
said, ‘I want you to lose weight by the end of next week. Don’t eat
anything, and stay on a running machine.’ I said O.K. The dress fit on
the wedding day, and I was happy in it.”
Alaïa’s fierce
independence was instilled by his grandmother, who, he remembers,
“always said, ‘Children until 7 should remain free. No need to clutter
their heads with religion and other things. They need to live freely as
children.’ ” He’s carried on this philosophy throughout his life. “I am
still free,” he insists.
Much of that may soon change. After a
brief and relatively hands-off foray with the Prada Group in the early
2000s, during which he expanded into accessories, Alaïa sold his company
to Richemont, the Swiss-based group that owns Cartier, Montblanc and
Chloé, in 2007. With big money behind him, growth plans are afoot:
Sozzani is in Paris in part to help oversee the construction of a new
four-story Alaïa outpost on rue Marignan, due to open this year. A
perfume — one of luxury fashion’s favorite cash cows — is in the works,
as is global retail expansion.
With all of this, Alaïa remains his
usual unassuming self: small (just over five foot two), soft-spoken and
feisty, dressed in his habitual black Mandarin jacket and trousers,
with three dogs — Anouar, a Maltese given to him by Campbell; another
Maltese named Waka Waka, from the singer Shakira; and Didine, a St.
Bernard — never far from his feet. At roughly 72 years old — he has
never admitted his age — he is fine with what appears to be Richemont’s
positioning of the brand for a long-term life after he is gone. “All can
continue without me,” he says. “It must continue. One day, you say,
‘That’s it’ for yourself. But not for the house. You simply have to find
the right replacement.”
Come September, the Paris fashion museum
Musée Galliera
is mounting an Alaïa retrospective for its reopening after a four-year
renovation. Among the gems that will be on display: the immense French
Tricolor gown that the designer made for the opera soprano Jessye Norman
to wear as she sang at the French bicentennial concert in 1989 and the
iconic spiral zipper dress that was inspired by a jacket Arletty wore in
the French classic “
Hôtel du Nord.”
There is also an Alaïa Foundation in the works: a place where his
personal design archives, as well as pieces from other designers he
admires and collects, like Madame Grès, Madeleine Vionnet and Jacques
Fath, will be on display. And in May, the Los Angeles Philharmonic will
perform a new version of “The Marriage of Figaro,” the Mozart classic,
at the Walt Disney Concert Hall with Alaïa-designed costumes and a Jean
Nouvel set. Though busy, Alaïa remains tireless. Of his 75 employees ,
many under 30, he announces proudly, “But they are older than I am!”
One, who is passing through the kitchen at that moment, laughs in
agreement. “I am very curious,” Alaïa says. “Every day, I say: What am I
going to learn today and whom am I going to meet?” No doubt some of
them will be at lunch.
CREDITS AND PHOTOS FROM NEW YORK TIMES
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