[fashionista-ta]

Here's part 1 of the Bazaar interview:

From Sept 05 Harper’s Bazaar [they didn’t see fit to put this online, so thought I would ]

An Artist of the Floating World by Lisa Armstrong

He has the warmth of a teddy bear, the sensitivity of a poet and the desire for women to project their true selves in his featherlight frocks. Is Alber Elbaz too nice to be working in fashion?

On a steamy summer day this past June, Alber Elbaz, a small, intense Israeli who has transformed Lanvin from a slightly dusty French fashion house into one of the industry’s most desirable, plodded his way up the stairs of the New York Public Library, where he had come to collect the CFDA’s award for best international designer. Squish, squish, squish. His leather lace-ups, still soaking wet after he traipsed through a bog in Central Park early that day for the Bazaar photo shoot, cut through any sense of haughtiness that the evening might possess.

Elbaz is recounting his trip to New York for me a month later at the Crillon hotel in Paris. It is around the corner from his headquarters, above the Lanvin store on the Faubourg Saint-Honore. His tale reminds me of a lunch we had a year ago, when he announced how tortured he was. At that moment he did not, I have ot say, look particularly agonized, but perhaps that is the curse of having twinkly eyes and a garrulous nature. But here we were, another lunch, another nook. Same mischievous eyes. I ask him how the agony is going. “Worse than ever,” he retorts, tucking into his lobster. “The big difference between now and five years ago is that it’s more neurotic. More scary. I’m just waiting for tragedy. You can’t imagine the agony after each show.”

This is what is called double jeopardy. After his very public humiliation at Yves Saint Laurent, when Gucci acquired the label in 1999 and Elbaz was let go a few months later, nothing in theory should hurt him again. Critically, he is adored. Commercially (a word he abhors, incidentally—“What does it mean?”), Lanvin goes from strength to strength. Its majority owner, the reticent Madame Shaw-Lan Wang, has said she knew within seven minutes of meeting Elbaz four years ago that he was the person for the job. But in any case, world domination is not—nor, one suspects, will it ever be—on his agenda.

The fear, though partly stoked by Elbaz’s superstitions (if he thinks the worst, it can’t happen), is real enough. And fear, he says, “is what keeps you going.” Occasionally, he even talks about getting out of fashion. But “he’s a stayer,” says Julie Gilhart, Barney’s New York’s vice president and fashion directory. “I think he will become one of the great designers of his time.”

Elbaz’s compulsion to “keep things real,” as he puts it (modest apartment, no car, office the size of an elevator—“smaller, come to think of it”), borders on the obsessive. It’s why he likes his friends in Israel to call him Albert. (He dropped the T when he arrived in New York in 1986 because everyone was overenunciating it.) It’s why he regularly gives himself stern little talkings-to (in the third person, no less). And why he rarely takes holidays: “Me, on holiday? First I lose my passport, then I miss the plane, the sky falls in and I hate the place when I get there. In any case, I can never stop thinking about work.”

He’s being slightly dramatic here, but that’s what artists do. The point is, Elbaz’s nature is so self-evidently poetic that one wonders why 20 years ago he chose to express himself through clothes, not words. “Irving Penn asked me the same thing recently,” reflects Elbaz. “I couldn’t stand the solitariness of being a writer. And I can express everything I want to say through clothes.”