[fashionista-ta]

Here 'tis ...

Part 2 of Harper’s Bazaar interview


{As mentioned in the thread about this issue, there’s a really gorgeous portrait that accompanies this article, but as you can see I have no scanner}

Well, not quite. “My God, Alber can talk,” says former mentor Tamara Yovel Jones, now head of the fashion-design dept at Shenkar, the prestigious design college outside Tel Aviv that Elbaz attended after leaving the Israeli army. “He always was this great personality. Very curious, very confident without ever being overbearing. I won’t say [he was] ambitious, because that can have harsh connotations. Most of all, what interested Alber was learning how to make good clothes.”

Not much has changed. Elbaz can still talk—impeccable Israeli-accented sound bites or long philosophical tracts that are always fascinating, funny or wise—and he remains intrigued by technique, creating dresses without zippers, clothes for hot weather that barely touch the body (except as a caress) and this fall’s suits without shoulder pads. “When I got the job at Lanvin,” he says, “it dawned on me that the one thing I had to do there was go back to basics. Does the world need another 600 handbags? I don’t think so. The challenge now is to make everything about design rather than styling.” For one so agonized, he looks remarkably cheerful. “Hmm, I’m definitely all about contradictions. And from the plus and the minus, maybe you get the energy.” [He is a Gemini …]


Perhaps it was energy, rather than geography or family antecedents, that propelled him toward fashion. Tel Aviv, where the Elbaz family—Alber, his three siblings, his hairdresser father and his aspiring-artist mother—moved from Morocco when he was six months old, was something of a fashion vacuum. [Btw, there seems to be a strong sense of French fashion in Morocco judging from some of the people I’ve known from there--] “For a time I wanted to be an actor,” he remembers. His stint in the army (“I was asthmatic, so 10 days’ marching with all the other defectives, and that was it”) saw him in charge of organizing entertainment. But he also drew—and always had done. “If you saw what I was drawing at five, honestly, it wasn’t so different from what I do now.” Except that all the dresses were long because he couldn’t draw legs—until his mother, Allegria, taught him how. {Does Olivier know how to draw legs? }

Allegria Elbaz has clearly been a forceful presence in Alber’s life. It was she who held down two jobs to support her four children after her husband died. And it is she who counsels her son to keep his head down, stay quiet. This is the way to evade disaster. “She’s very sensitive, my mother,” says Elbaz. “The whole family is. And emotional. But please don’t make out my childhood to be this Cinderella story. It was a bit tough, that’s all.”

Perhaps the Cinderella syndrome is also rooted in his apparent incongruity: As Gilhart observes, Elbaz is “overwhelmingly loving, kind and loyal.” What’s a sensitive soul like him doing in fashion? Even these qualities aren’t quite what they seem. He may be warm, humble and translucently vulnerably, but as Gilhart says, “he’s faster than a speeding bullet when it comes to thinking creatively and assessing a situation.”

Ten years ago Elbaz may not have embraced the kind of jet-setting lifestyle that was de rigueur for designers who wanted to create global uberbrands, but his philosophy just happens to jibe perfectly with the fashion cognoscenti’s current desire for discreet presences who can craft individual clothes that exude emotional authenticity. “I love his sense of what a woman wants to wear,” says Nicole Kidman. [pull quote] “He makes real clothes that are elegant and very modern. I think it’s the simplicity that I am drawn to, the clean silhouette and his amazing sense of color.” Kidman is not the only fashion icon to shop at Lanvin, and I do mean shop—the company has neither the means not the mentality to bombard Hollywood with freebies. Sofia Coppola and Sarah Jessica Parker have also made the pilgrimage to the Paris boutique. As Kidman says, “I had bought a few things for myself already [at Lanvin] and had been wearing them out and about before I first met Alber on an impromptu shopping trip in Paris.”