If there is one artist who is extremely interested in the architecture of the female form and who knows how to display it, it is Azzedine Alaïa.
– Jean Nouvel
Fashion, turn to the left. Fashion, turn to the right. People of fashion can all too often be as loud and tasteless as any ceremonial asininity lauded by the goon squad at American Vogue. The maddening extra is that what these figures are actually accomplishing is to demonstrate how heinous and out of touch they really are. “Who will remember Anna Wintour in the history of fashion? No one,” remarked one of the greatest artists in the history of dressmaking – who likewise mastered the true art of living, untouched by the constraints and the bullshit of the fashion industry – Azzedine Alaïa (1935–2017): thinker, tailor, sovereign, sprite.
“Alaïa sculpts human flesh from the depths of his lair, reconstructing the female figure by correcting imperfections and emphasising existing qualities. He combines violence, modesty and eroticism by hinting at a woman’s desirable attributes while keeping them out of reach – the essence of the Oriental,” argues François Baudot in his short profile (1996) on the master womenswear designer in which he also suggests that Alaïa’s finest dresses “are those which are created by just two snips of the scissors – fluid motion suspended in time and space with just a few pins”.
The “two-snips” prowess is of course nothing but a hyperbole from the sketchy biographer since the designer could spend weeks on end on a single dress, building a composition of some fifty elements on his fitting model to reach that distinctive Alaïa grade of “effortless” sophistication. The dresses on the mannequins displaying four decades of Alaïa’s work at Sven-Harry’s Art Museum in Stockholm, the exhibition is called Master of Couture – Azzedine Alaïa, do not really necessitate a living body inside to come to life as the oneiric beauty and the lubricious ingenuity of these showpieces absolutely percolate with womanliness and in-built movement.
The presentation on the torsos, modelled on the figure of a young Naomi Campbell, sort of ideates (if you have a lively mind) a caryatid in a draped and tucked peplos dress who leaves her peristyle assignment for good, puts on a suggestive gymslip on Mount Olympus and walks through history while attentively gathering the technical savvies from the finest names in fashion. Master of Couture is a statuesque exhibition of these embodied figures wrapped in stretch fabrics, seamless one-piece knits or sculptured leather enhanced by grommets, bandages, laces and spiralling zippers. Yet there is no theatrics or froufrou in this place. The exhibition is a sweeping grand total of an artist whose aesthetic guidance came from two principal sources: Alaïa’s own genius – “I am the artisan of my own knowledge” – and his abounding love for women.
In his draft script for Robert Palmer’s sublimely nonsensical “Addicted to Love” video from 1986 – with the five scandal beauties as his bogus backup band in their titillating, figure-hugging, liquorice black dresses – Terence Donovan explained that “I would simply dress a group of international models in Azzedine Alaïa dresses [because he] produces clothes that make men become quite irrational and women seem to admire him. He understands the linear engineering of a woman’s body unlike any other designer.”
Just a few years earlier, when Alaïa had gained world recognition, Marina Sturdza, the Romanian Princess who died the same year as Alaïa, wrote that his creations “delight in every female curve and live without exaggeration, without costumery or caricature. In fact, his design premise is simplicity itself. Alaïa marries fabric to the female body, with respect and with pleasure. His clothes are instantly recognisable, utterly different from anyone else’s. He moulds and manipulates even strong-textured fabrics on to the female shape, like a second skin. Silhouette and shape are everything, and the body itself his essential inspiration. Alaïa’s clothes are lightyears away from anything that smacks of trendiness and he doesn’t give a fig about fads or ‘what’s in’. His clothes are frankly and unabashedly sexy and women adore them.”
Master of Couture is the first Azzedine Alaïa exhibition in the Nordic countries, or as Sven-Harry’s Museum Director Dragana Kussoffsky Maksimović adds with a twinkle, “the first north of London”. Kussoffsky Maksimović has been mad about Alaïa since the early days of discovering “these feminine creations” in the fashion press. “They are still so incredibly cogent. It is sensual, and I think it is so beautiful. This is passion. When I was leafing through the fashion magazines in the 1980s and the 90s, it was always Alaïa who stood out to me. I knew that I wanted to show his sculptural clothes, there was no question about it, that was absolutely what I wanted to do.”
Alaïa had a very joyous upbringing – “Life was poetic, lyrical” – but even a happy childhood would surely reap the benefits of a few touches of fairy tale endorsement, at least for someone of Alaïa’s brilliance. And since he didn’t grow up with his biological mother (his ma and pa were farmers who lived in a dusty town in the middle of nowhere), he made up stories about her: that she came from Sweden, that she had been married in the 1950s wearing a wedding dress designed by Jacques Fath, and that her name was Stella. The name and the fantasy originated from the French fashion model Stella Maret, and the story is retold in Marc Parent’s book about his dazzling mother:
“I got to know Stella in 1980, looking at old editions of Vogue, L’Officiel, La Femme Chic and L’art et la mode from the 50s. I fell for her silhouette, the way she carried herself, her allure, her whole look, really. For me she evoked the mystery of les robes à l’intérieur, the feminine shape inside the dresses. I loved that era; it was such a sophisticated time for fashion when so much care and elaboration was put into women’s clothing,” Alaïa mused. “Stella is femininity. For me, the thing that said woman about her was her waist! It makes me want to make all women that feminine, and it was the inspiration behind a dress I came up with, made of new textiles, with an invisible interior corset that cinched the waist. In 1982, I also created several leather suits with an ultrasmall waist.”
Alaïa’s strongest childhood experience of raw femininity was a breathing image of Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866) amplified by an infant’s head popping out of the slit. He almost passed out. The ten-year-old boy was slapped back to reality by the local midwife, the French madame who had delivered him into this world.
The place was Sidi Bou Saïd, a Mediterranean suburb to the Tunisian capital, where he and his brother and his much loved sister Hafida lived with their maternal grandparents – a grandma who provided young Alaïa with solid ideas about human freedom, and a grandpa with a weekly routine that too exerted an influence on boy Alaïa: Thursday evenings he was reading aloud from Arabian Nights for the kids, Fridays he was playing cards at a café while allowing Azzedine to soak in the screened delights at the Ciné-Soir (where an Italian actress’s way of tucking her shorts alone could make him swoon), and Saturdays he took the boy to his station to let him have a zing of real-world policework.
However, as Edmund White delineates in Our Paris: Sketches from Memory, there was one specific Thursday each month when an Egyptian superstar performed, and her voice was ritually transmitted on the radio: “On the morning of her monthly recital the young Azzedine would be sent to the local café, which possessed the only radio in town, to reserve a chair as near the radio as possible for his grandfather. There his grandfather would install himself with a jasmine flower behind his ear and sigh and weep as Umm Kulthum improvised verse after verse, hour after hour, of her lovesick ballads. On that day, once a month, no business was conducted throughout the Arab world, all misdeeds were overlooked, and no war could be fought. Umm Kulthum taught Alaïa his first lesson about the power and mystery of female artistry.”
A promenade side by side with a beautiful woman in Tunis meant the world to boy Alaïa. Everything from the way she walked to how tastefully her body was enrobed was mentally noted. There’s a passage in Hans Ulrich Obrist’s interview with Alaïa, in the first issue of System magazine, in which he talks about when he was visiting Hafida’s college and how “one of the nuns would give me a little pat on the shoulder, and I felt as if I’d been touched by grace. The nuns still wore cornettes back then, and I thought they were so beautiful because they had such white skin when everyone else was tanned. I’d walk behind them in the street to watch their brown ankles and feet, which contrasted so much with their faces. And I thought the movement of their robes with their swinging crosses was lovely.”
Mme Pineau, whom he used to assist when a baby was born, offered a wealth of inspiration with her numerous artbooks and the fashion magazines from Paris. Madame also fancied ordering beautiful things for herself from the grand Parisian department stores. In Susanna Frankel’s Visionaries: Interviews with Fashion Designers, Alaïa speaks about the enchantment of being around his Gallic influencer: “In the evening, after work, she used to sit next to me and place orders for clothes. When the boxes came, we opened them together. I was so happy. I can still remember the little printed cotton summer dresses, the white gloves, the shoes.”
Boy Alaïa’s considerate and perceptive disposition and his very certain flair for immersion pertained to an advancing master. He knew that Paris would be where he would live all his days, and he figured that he would do well there after studying as a sculptor at the Institut Supérieur des Beaux-Arts de Tunis. Madame was the one who helped him getting into the art school, in spite of his young age. This was the proper beginning of the boundless succession of marvellous women who were to give Alaïa complete, unprecedented support and adoration throughout the rest of his life. This human fleet of benevolence and refinement would very soon after he had relocated make him realise “how Parisian chic is in fact a question of a person’s way of thinking”.
To pay for his art studies, Alaïa assisted a seamstress and did much of the shop’s stitching at home. This piqued the curiosity of two girls who told their wealthy parents about the unfamiliar but obviously gifted young tailor. A cascade of benignant events transpired by virtue of the female jungle telegraph and in late June 1956, when he was twenty-one, Alaïa had attained an apprenticeship at the atelier of Christian Dior in Paris, under the guidance of Technical Director Marguerite Carré. (“She was an incredible woman, she symbolised my vision of the big technician, people like that don’t exist anymore. I was all eyes.”) Alaïa had to leave after only a few days, however, since this was at the height of the Algerian War and it had become too much of an issue among the sour clients that Dior was housing a young Arab.
A letter of introduction from the Tunis high society to Tunisian-born Simone Zehrfuss, spouse of the famous architect, was Alaïa’s ticket to the fashionable society of Paris. His first abode in Paris was a small garret next to one of his besties from the Beaux-Arts school, Leïla Menchari, and it was on rue Lord Byron – where Jean-Pierre Melville’s contract killer Jef Costello has his hideaway in Le samouraï (1967) – that he surrounded himself with his little sewing machine, mid-century furniture classics by Jean Prouvé and Charlotte Perriand (gifts from the Zehrfusses) and a host of famous ladies and young models all yearning for his rare designs. Women also so much enjoyed being around Alaïa as he was the shy but winsome oppositeness of Paul Thomas Anderson’s petulant sniveller, Reynolds Woodcock, in Phantom Thread (2017). Add to that that Azzedine Alaïa was always at the helm of everything, entirely, from these salad days of the late 1950s to what would become his final couture show in 2017.
It was during the many gatherings with the beau monde at the home of the Zehrfusses that he befriended novelist Louise de Vilmorin. Cues he took from her were in particular “French chic, elegance, allure and savoir-vivre … there were many things to learn, and intellectually it was marvellous.” Although she was almost three times his age, Louise de Vilmorin would beautifully say that having Alaïa as her couturier and confidant was the only looking glass that she ever needed. Alaïa spent his Sundays at de Vilmorin’s estate near Orly Airport as a constant guest at her dinner salons, where he encountered Orson Welles, Jean Cocteau, André Malraux, René Clair and many other luminaries.
At the end of the decade – during his three seasons with Guy Laroche on avenue Montaigne, where his technical skills and his profound awareness of haute couture intensified – Alaïa was asked to stay with one of his admirers, Marquise de Mazan, in her vast spaces at Parc Monceau (only a short walk from his first humble dwelling). One of the dinner guests at the Marquise’s was Countess Nicole de Blégiers who became an important patron, but who also invited him to live with her family in 1959. In their lavish homes in the 16th arrondissement, Alaïa took care of the kids and cooked for the whole family after the daily two-hour-long appointments with the dashing yet discreet ladies were over at seven. It was a life of stability and appreciation and everything was coming together for him with the designs that he developed in these residences during the first part of the 1960s:
“I was very lucky to meet the Countess de Blégiers,” he voiced. “I became quite a good babysitter, and I made her dresses. It was the end of the Algerian War, and it was difficult for a Tunisian to find a job in France. The countess’s husband gave me his business card to say that I was his ‘protégé’ so they didn’t bother me when they stopped me in the street.”
Just before Azzedine Alaïa set up his business at 60 rue de Bellechasse in 1964, which would become his legendary address for the next twenty years, he was living and partying together with a model friend of his. This brief period of external merrymaking also included a custom that the countess had encouraged him to begin with, as a fun way to aid his career: to invite his private clientele along with his friends (who were often the same kinds of people) for dinners. One of his guests was Arletty, the good bad girl Clara in Marcel Carné’s masterpiece Le jour se lève (1939), who he had loved since the days at the Ciné-Soir; how she dressed and the complete way in which she carried herself. He met the star in the flesh in her dressing room at Théâtre de la Renaissance in 1960 and they remained very, very close till the Fin of her life in 1992.
At the time that the main curator of the Stockholm exhibition, Olivier Saillard, took over the directorship of the fashion museum Palais Galliera in Paris in 2013, he carried out a long interview with Alaïa before the opening of the maître’s first (and much overdue) hometown retrospective:
“With Arletty, I learnt even more of the tricks of Parisian chic that nobody teaches you. She was a very strong influence. My dress with the zip that turns all around the body was born from the one she wore in Hôtel du Nord [1938]. The dresses shaped like troubadours’ tunics and the long gowns that she wears in Les Visiteurs du soir [1942] inspired a number of the outfits in my Autumn/Winter 1988–89 collection. The butterflies of the Autumn/Winter 1991–92 collection are an homage to Arletty and the bodysuit that she wears in the film Tempête [1940]. Her witty words, her effrontery and her insolence dictated some of my principals. She would often say that she was ‘virgin of all decoration’. That made me decide to remove jewellery and accessories from my collections to place the naked garment at the forefront. She was so simple, so full of popular and majestic grandeur. Arletty embodies the Parisienne.”
The help and the initiative came from friends, and the backing from Simone Zehrfuss, to enable for Alaïa to set up his first atelier in the city. With the basic five-room apartment (one hundred and forty square metres in all) on the first floor at 60 rue de Bellechasse, Alaïa formed his very ideal way of living (he always slept on a mattress on the floor) and working, combining everything that was needed in one place (and he was fine with having his défilés running through the kitchen). A handful of people were hired, including Alaïa’s factotum Ibrahima Soumaré who would stay with him for the rest of his life. Almost equally loyal were the gutsy mesdames of the monied class who treasured and revelled in the nonconformist/traditionalist Alaïa’s delightful and intricate made-to-measure designs.
In the mid-1960s, with the Youthquake movement in full swing, Alaïa was asked by Yves Saint Laurent to design the templates for his famous Mondrian dresses which became a successful synthesis of high fashion and Pop. This was a dreadful time for many of the haute couture houses. In Twiggy in Black and White, the wonder kid recounts a trip she made to Paris for the Daily Sketch after she had become the Face of 1966: “Readers back in Britain would be offered my views on the collections in the form of a letter to Mum. Now it makes me cringe; but I was only sixteen and didn’t know any better. I lasted two days. It was the Balmain show that caused the stink. Monsieur Balmain himself was lovely to me, but his clothes were hardly innovative and Shirley Flack, the journalist whose idea the whole thing was, saw no reason to tone down what I thought. ‘Twiggy’s letter to Mum’ appeared the next day. Balmain’s clothes were fine for someone middle-aged like her, I wrote, but were old-fashioned. Quel Scandale. I was immediately banned by the Chambre Syndicale.”
When Cristóbal Balenciaga threw in the towel in 1968, Alaïa received a phone call from Mlle Renée who had worked alongside the Spanish master for decades. She suggested that Alaïa should take hold of what remained at 10 avenue George V of the garments, and rework them according to his own desires. It is true that he filled waste bags of these sublimities, and that he examined them like a scientist – very much as Grandmaster Flash would dismantle a Technics 1200 turntable in the 1970s in order to penetrate the fundamentals of the tool that he was working with – but Alaïa left them as they were, impeccable:
“I was stunned by their beauty and by the hand that had created them and seemed present in the dresses still. It was impossible for me to dream of touching these clothes. To intervene in any way on these examples of equilibrium would have been sacrilege, and it appeared to me as a matter of urgency to rescue others. Since many years, I have been buying and receiving the dresses, the coats, the jackets that testify to the great history of fashion. It has become for me somewhat of a matter of state to preserve them, a mark of solidarity towards those who, before me, have had the pleasure and the exigency of the scissors. It is my way of paying homage to all of the craft and the ideas that these garments manifest.”
From here on, Alaïa’s collecting of thousands and thousands of pieces of all of his cherished designers from the past (his favourite decades were the 1930s and 50s) went on in correspondence with his own work. At the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa at 18 rue de la Verrerie, a complex of industrial buildings that he bought and moved to in 1987, there are over seven hundred articles by Madame Grès who, like Alaïa, was a trained sculptor. She (like Alaïa) understood the art of perfect drapery – and the life-itself allure of what is taking place in the play between what is revealed and what is concealed – and with her special plis de Grès technique she pleated the knitted silk of her dresses into a silhouette that was both wonderfully modern and timeless as the sculptures of Ancient Greece.
He collected Vionnet and absorbed her bias-cut method which created a blessed trinity between fabric, body and movement; Schiaparelli, who (just like Alaïa) loved to work with synthetic fibres along with the most expensive materials and haute couture practices, and to develop new kinds of fabrics together with the industry bests, and (like Alaïa) converted functional clothing elements (such as zippers) into something very else; Jean Patou and Paul Poiret; Adrian who was the star designer of MGM in the 1930s and whose costumes Alaïa bought by the hundreds from a Philadelphia collector, and (just to sample a few of them) the American master Charles James who Alaïa discovered on his first trip to New York City in 1982, when Bergdorf Goodman introduced Alaïa in the US with a runway show. Among his contemporaries he liked Vivienne Westwood and Yohji Yamamoto (and as with Yamamoto he was always dressed in a black outfit that was his uniform). When Marseille’s Maison Mode Méditerranée opened in 1988, Alaïa made a huge contribution by donating one hundred of his own dresses.
What was also so good about Azzedine Alaïa was that he wasn’t infatuated by the pomp and circumstance of his profession. “I have never followed fashion. It is women who have dictated my actions. It is necessary to know the academy of their bodies in order to know what they want before they know themselves. As the years passed, I have followed the teachings of their silhouette. The shoulder is essential, the waist primordial. The arch of the back and the backside are capital. The breasts, you can always make them look great. The neck, if it is short, needs to be flattered by a high collar and small shoulder pads,” he told Olivier Saillard.
“I like clothes that stay beautiful and eternal, that are not betrayed by details, ornaments, or colours that age them prematurely. Those are the designs that are the simplest yet the most difficult to create. I have created clothes in my mind that I have esteemed to be finished almost ten years after beginning the first toiles. Certain jackets, I am correcting them endlessly, to the great despair of my closest collaborators. There are garments that are made to never be produced. The research is more important.”
In 1972, the year after Alaïa had been affirmed as a member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, Cécile de Rothschild was having a fitting in Alaia’s atelier and brought along a friend who “wore flat shoes and radiated something very modern” – it was the Swedish fridge and cinematic icon Greta Gustafsson: “Garbo was sitting there, in a big turtleneck with the sleeves pulled down, so that you couldn’t see her hands. I looked at her eyes, her nose, her eyelids. Incredible. She truly was absolutely magnificent. She asked me to make her a large overcoat. I’ve kept the model. She wanted it to be really big, like a military coat, and in blue. She had her own style. I made her jersey sweaters, fitted straight trousers, flat shoes, and three big overcoats.”
Alaïa’s diligence and hard work resulted in a train of events which led to his first prêt-à-porter collection in 1979. It was based on a bigtime refusal from the very brand that used every single picture that Guy Bourdin took for them during the spectacular years that the complicated French artist-photographer was absolutely unsurpassable (1972–80). However, when Alaïa presented his commissioned collection for Charles Jourdan, all they could see (while kicking up a fuss) was the kink, fetishism and suppressed violence that was more than evident in Bourdin’s imagery.
Sarah Perks, one of the co-curators of the Stockholm show and a longtime staffer at Alaïa, affirms that “People say a lot about his work, that he walks on a tightrope between the woman who is a nun and the whore [laughs]. He designed costumes for the Crazy Horse in Paris that is famous for being sexier than Moulin Rouge. He has sometimes both the head and body totally covered, and he chooses to reveal skin with transparency but always with an added element of modesty.”
Alaïa’s newfound main man Thierry Mugler brought the fashion press to the Bellechasse atelier in 1979. For the editors at Elle, it was love at first sight when they lay eyes on Alaïa’s discarded Charles Jourdan collection, and they were craving these things so much that they asked him if they could wear them at the fashion shows. The new decade would bring new connections, steadfast friends, muses, affectionate devotees, a maturation of his business, and in 1981/82 Alaïa burst into view with designs that made him beyond famous. Maison Alaïa was established when the first défilé went through his kitchen in 1983, with three drop-in shows a day for a whole week.
“He revisited a lot of the ideas from throughout the different decades of his career. He said that if an idea is good, you have to explore it, explore it, explore it – distil it, and make sure that you have really exhausted the potential of that good idea. He said that good ideas are rare and that you are lucky if you have one in a year. He very much refused the pressure from the fashion industry that expects designers to come up with a hundred new ideas four times a year. It is not the way you make great designs,” explains Sarah Perks and mentions some of the recurrent themes that distinguish Alaïa’s work, “notably the use of leather, the close-to-body silhouette and the inspiration from the natural world of flora and fauna. He used exotic skins from the very beginning of his career, which is often treated in a brut kind of way. He really centred on the scale of the exotic skins with essential focus points which highlight the anatomy of the female body. He also very much drew attention to the back of the body.”
The world moves on a woman’s hips – but as Alaïa learned from one of his patrons, the most important part of the attire is the back “because it is the last thing you see when a woman leaves the room, and it is what you remember”.
Azzedine Alaïa regarded himself as a bâtisseur – a builder – of dresses, and as François Baudot points out in his profile, “Traditionally, a dress is fitted from the shoulders and a skirt from the waist – they hang, or rather ‘fall’, from these points with varying degrees of success depending on the talent of the designer and the quality of the garment. What Alaïa did, however, was to create clothes which cling, such as his dress made of bound strips. While following the body’s slightest movements, it still manages to retain its original shape. In this way a woman, as a living sculpture, embodies the synthesis of Alaïa’s two vocations as sculptor and fashion designer.”
There’s a portrait by Jean-Paul Goude of Alaïa in a balance act between the legs of a supine Maillol sculpture in the Jardin des Tuileries, and the dressmaker is wrapping the naked lady in bandages. His bandage dresses – an idea that he got from Egyptian mummies, and that somewhat paradoxically provide great movability – are accompanied by open slits along the sides which often put the emphasis right on the hips. That year, 1983, the first Alaïa-dedicated store was launched in the US, on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills and, at the other end of the scale, there was a skirt made for French mail order company 3 Suisses so that just about anyone could afford to buy an Alaïa design.
One of the many things that Alaïa loved about Mme Pinot was that she schooled him in the history of France. The boy’s favourite parts were the stories about Versailles and the bluebloods who lived there, especially Madame de Pompadour. In 1984, Alaïa moved his business to 17 rue du Parc-Royal (in the vicinity of Musée Picasso), to a townhouse where his silk-stocking favourite once had lived. When Barneys presented Alaïa at the Palladium in New York City, fifty models were parading in his designs to great acclaim, and every one of the one thousand guests wore black to honour the master.
On March 2, 1985, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Bordeaux presented A Day with Azzedine Alaïa: Fashion 1980-1985 with almost everything there was to show and discuss about Alaïa. On October 23, he received the “Designer of the Year” and “Collection of the Year” awards from the Minister of Culture at the Palais Garnier, while Grace Jones was performing “La Vie en rose” wearing Alaïa (just like she did in A View to a Kill from the same year). Sarah Perks points at a resplendent dress in a flowing fabric, as magenta in pitch as the Djinn chairs in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), that begins with a capuchin hood and ends in a train: “This dress is from the Summer 1986 collection which was shown in October just before M Alaïa was bestowed two ‘Oscars’ at the French Fashion Awards and Grace Jones accompanied him for the ceremony wearing this gown. Obviously, you show the collections six months before they will be in the stores.”
The first thing that Aletty blurted in her characteristic way when Alaïa entered her dressing room in 1960 was: “He is short, but he sure is unforgettable.” Alaïa was only a metre and a half tall, and next to his leggy supermodels – who loved his work so much that all they asked for was the currency of his clothes – he looked like Charles Ray abreast of his towering, power dressed sculpture Mannequin (1991) of 244 centimetres.
“Alaïa works sometimes late into the night, his mouth full of pins, as he drapes and pulls and turns and twists and dances around the dais like Pygmalion dressing an already transformed and fully alive Galatea,” recalls Edmund White in his Paris chronicle. “I remember one night when the Galatea was a ravishing, pouting, smiling teenager, Naomi Campbell […] who then was just a sumptuously beautiful shy English adolescent. She kept turning obediently as Azzadine ordered her to do, though when he stuck a pin in her she shouted lustily and tapped the tiny maestro on the head.”
Perks talks with mirth in her voice about the paternal-filial bond between the couturier and his teeny model: “M Alaïa discovered Naomi Campbell and she first worked for him for the summer 1987 collection, so that would be late 1986 when she was sixteen years old. She lived with him because her mother knew that Azzedine Alaïa would treat her like a father. Naomi was a very spirited person and an anecdote that M Alaïa loved to tell was when Naomi used to sneak out at night, take some sexy outfit from the press collection, and escape through the back door to go to the nightclub Les Bains Douches. And M Alaïa would go and get her in the middle of the night.”
One connection that is impossible to understand, however, is how Alaïa could embrace the Phil Collins of the art world. After Alaïa had relocated to his final, and this time huge and highly functional, space at 18 rue de la Verrerie (near Hôtel de Ville) in 1987, Julian Schnabel was once again there to decorate the store at 7 rue de Moussy (situated on the side street to the building), just like he had done with the one in Soho, New York. (Alaïa: “[Julian Schnabel] came to my shop and I’m so embarrassed to say it but I’d never heard of him and when he offered me one of his paintings I just shrugged, but Jacqueline [Beaurang, his then-wife] was so beautiful I thought I’d love to have her wearing any coat in New York so I agreed.”)
The bâtisseur had found his ideal residence in Marais. Here he worked like a modern Paul Poiret, creating his pieces directly on a live model. Perks says that Alaïa “almost never made any drawings. He could do every single step of the creation of the garment, from draping the fabric in the very beginning on the model’s body to altering the pattern, stitching, to the last details. The fitting model was always there, seven days a week, until the late hours. He would begin by taking the fabric directly to the fitting model’s body and transfer the fabric to pattern paper, and then give it to [his assistant Éric Sartori] so he could begin with the garment. M Alaïa would bring it back on the model and do one seam at a time, changing millimetre by millimetre, and towards the end he would alter the pattern himself late at night when everybody had left, and it was just him and Ana Carolina Reis. He said that it was the only time that he could concentrate on doing the paper part of the pattern. When he had a good idea, he would scribble on the edge of a pattern paper and keep it in a little box on his table.”
After seven in the evening Alaïa used to drink a glass of vodka, take a little Warhol snooze, and then go back to work till six in the morning with the TV on. “He had a huge television in front of his sewing table and on it were National Geographic Channel documentaries about animal life because he loved animals. He had nine cats and five dogs. He wished that he would have had the luxury to have someone come and read books to him because he loved literature, but he never had the time to read.”
Savouring Alaïa’s quintessential decade at Sven-Harry’s in Stockholm gets you thinking about the overblown and hairsprayed 1980s and how Alaïa’s work was and forever is another thing altogether. Time wasn’t making him; he was making time.
The 1980s ended with a fanfare for Alaïa when he gained French citizenship, contrariwise to his 1990s which started with a crushing blow. Alaïa’s struggles with his sister’s death in 1992 were so deep that he, for years, withdrew from most aspects of what he loved so much about his profession. Instead, he cultivated his skills: “My knowledge of technique has been an instrument of analysis and rehabilitation,” Alaïa explained. “I do not believe that I have cast aside a single one of the ideas that I have pursued since the beginning. I feel rather more that I have placed them in an evolution. The technical knowledge that has always deeply interested me has enabled me to drive ideas forward, to take them down other roads and create new leads, each time with a greater exactitude and refinement.”
1996 – the year when there were rumours that Alaïa (quite ironically) had rejected an offer to take over as couturier at Dior – was the start of museum retrospectives on Alaïa’s work. Maison Alaïa was resumed in 1999 thanks to the vast encouragement that he received from one of his dearest friends, Carla Sozzani. The runway presentations returned in 2002 with an haute couture show, and he would produce two more haute couture shows under the glass ceiling, where Fondation Azzedine Alaïa is today, with the help of the workforce from Yves Saint Laurent who retired in 2002.
Sarah Perks cautiously lifts up a skirt and starts to count the layers and the materials – “We have the laser-cut cotton, a silk crinoline, a silk fibre with horse hair …” – and walks over to the next piece: “This is the dress with the fantastic knitted lace from M Alaïa’s last couture show in 2017. And this dress is quite unusual because we do not often see sparkles of bling-bling with Alaïa, his embellishments are more subtle or functional, such as in the zips and the eyelets, and more in the textures as in this beautiful, quilted embroidery with a little bit of whimsy. The lace came out of the knitting machine in one piece. And also, the craftmanship in the draping and the gathering of the velvet, and the interesting mixture of textures and textiles that you often see in M Alaïa’s work.”
When Galleria Borghese in Rome exhibited Azzedine Alaïa in 2015, the curators of Couture/Sculpture did a beautiful job to emphasise his sixty-five dresses’ sisterhood relation to the classic sculptures in the museum. Alaïa maintained that “I can safely say that my clothes are undatable; they are made to stand the test of time. Since arriving in Paris in the 1950s, I believe that I have never responded to any other demands or imperatives than those of the women who surrounded me and continue to surround me still.”
Fashion – it is right before your eyes, the beautiful and eternal.
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| Photo: John Scarisbrick/Sven-Harrys konstmuseum. |
Master of Couture – Azzedine Alaïa at Sven-Harry’s Art Museum in Stockholm through March 16, 2025.
