September 25, 2005 Ny Times Magazine
September 25, 2005
The Classicist
By LYNN HIRSCHBERG
This past June in New York, in the days before he was presented with the award for international designer of the year by the Council of Fashion Designers of America (C.F.D.A.), the fashion world's equivalent of an Oscar for Best Picture, Alber Elbaz was not rejoicing. The award was a validation of sorts, a long-overdue acknowledgment of his talent and the work he had done since 2002 at Lanvin, the long-moribund French couture house that he has rejuvenated. But the attention and accolades, though welcome, made Elbaz both giddy and anxious. The giddiness was largely for show, a part of the cuddly, jovial image that Elbaz puts forth, especially in social situations. He is a small, round man, and he nearly always wears a black suit with trousers that are much too short, a silk bow tie knotted loosely at his throat and black rectangular glasses that set off the softness of his face. Elbaz understands the power of fashion, how clothes can create a personality, real or otherwise. This gift for artifice extends to his own sartorial choices. While he appears to be playful and a bit theatrical (and he can be), Elbaz is mostly thoughtful and distinctly aware of the vagaries of his chosen business. Now 44, he has worked in fashion for nearly 20 years, including, for 2 of them, as the chief designer of women's wear at Yves St. Laurent, and he knows that being chosen by a group like the C.F.D.A. means that you will, inevitably, be discarded in favor of another. "Being a designer is not about being a star - I didn't work for the eight seconds when you get a prize," Elbaz told me over lunch at Chanterelle in TriBeCa the day before the awards ceremony. "For me, there is nothing scarier than being of the moment. Because the moment ends."
Elbaz's fashion philosophy - that clothes should be timeless, that the elegant simplicity of a Lanvin dress or skirt or sweater should endure for many seasons - represents a departure from the luxury-addicted, logo-crazed fashion world of the 1990's. That time was personified by Tom Ford, the designer of Gucci (and later, Yves St. Laurent, where he succeeded Elbaz). Quite simply, Ford sold sex - specifically, high-gloss, international jet-set sex. All his clothes and accessories were created with an eye toward the kind of seduction that is best accomplished through an overt display of the goods. Through Gucci, Ford created the global fashion business - a woman in Japan was carrying the same interlocking-G hobo bag as a woman in Kalamazoo - and he also expertly marketed himself: Ford's carefully maintained stubble, nut-brown tan and half-open white shirt made him a symbol of the times.
But, as it always does, the fashion mood shifted. Even before Ford quit designing for Gucci in 2004, he realized that the luxury market was changing. Sept. 11th had altered the outlook even of the fashion-conscious, and although women still wanted something sexy, their sense of what that might be was less obvious. "It's a hard time for women today," Elbaz said as he ate a cheese puff at lunch. "Women today are not allowed to have age. They have to be not young and not old. As a designer, I have to understand that and also what a woman goes through in the course of a day. Women have to be perfect at home, perfect at work, perfect lover, perfect mother, perfect daughter. And they have no age! That's something to understand, and then, I ask myself, given all that, what is it women want in their wardrobe? What is worth them spending 1,000 Euros rather than 1,000 pennies?"
When Ford sat down to conjure up a dress, he usually began by thinking about a woman's backside. "I concentrate on the butt," he once told me. "If that looks good, everything looks good." Elbaz begins designing with the waist, quite a different erogenous zone. "The waist is the most important part of a woman's body," he explained. On first glance, Elbaz's clothes for Lanvin can look simple, but then you notice the care that has been taken with these classic shapes: the washed silk faille has been cut so that the pleats of a skirt fall like a tulip, skimming the hips; a waist-length jacket has been shaped so that the linen moves in sync with the body; a simple trench coat in artfully rumpled gold silk fits like a long-beloved garment. Elbaz's embellishments are unique - tarnished metal paillettes adorn the grosgrain-ribbon waistband of a fuchsia silk sheath; ornate gold beading decorates the arms of a humble white cotton peasant blouse; and pearls, an Elbaz trademark, are entwined with tulle for long necklaces or sewn onto silk taffeta and then tied around the neck like a beautiful, ornamental bib.
All of Elbaz's clothes combine the hard and the soft: he is an expert tailor who leaves seams unfinished; he will sew a garment so exquisitely that it could be worn inside out, but he will intentionally leave the collar frayed. "I don't relate to perfection," Elbaz said. "And neither do the women who buy my clothes. I cannot bake, but I can cook a wonderful meal because I can improvise. But I could never make a cake because they tell you 10 grams of this and 10 minutes here, and I cannot follow. So, no cake, no perfection."
Elbaz - who was born in Casablanca, reared in Israel and then moved to New York in 1984 and now lives in Paris - may represent a new kind of global perspective. Mostly, his clothes evoke classic French style, with their feminine sophistication and refinement, but they are also, like American sportswear, conceived with an eye toward a woman's active life. And the signature Elbaz accents - the pearls and the coins he uses like jewels - seem to have been purchased at a Middle Eastern bazaar. This multicultural formula has been a financial success at Lanvin. In the last three years, sales have reportedly risen to about $100 million a year, 10 times what they were when Elbaz took over the collection in 2002. During a personal appearance at Barneys in New York last winter, Elbaz sold $1 million worth of clothes in one day. "Fashion is important all over the world," Elbaz said. "And we have to bring beauty back to fashion. But sexy . . . that's a word I cannot hear anymore."
This may be a veiled reference to Tom Ford, who was the darling of the fashion world for almost a decade. Elbaz has said that he believes his ascent would have been speedier if he was conventionally handsome like Ford. "I sometimes think that if I was thinner and more photogenic, my career might be different," he repeated as he sampled a goat-cheese ravioli. "But I'm also afraid to lose weight because my design sense might disappear." The fact that Elbaz looks different from most of the fashion flock may allow him some philosophical separation, too. His image may not be Ford's superslick, after-dark image, but Elbaz has his own carefully honed persona, one that, perhaps, more aptly fits these uncertain times. Some of his gowns are extravagant, but for the most part, they are classic pieces with a twist and a perfect fit. Even well-heeled customers desire that mix: pieces that seem one of a kind but are also practical. In this climate, Elbaz has emerged as the favorite outsider for fashion world insiders.
"We love an outsider, especially if they are supertalented like Alber," says Ronnie Cooke Newhouse, who worked with Lanvin to create its recent advertising campaign and who has been wearing Elbaz's clothes for years. "But nobody chooses that role for themselves, because if you're really the outsider - and Alber has been - it's a much harder life. In our business, there's the tortoise and the hare. Being the tortoise has been important for Alber - his experiences have made him who he is. And now that he's crossed the finish line, everyone wants to invite the tortoise in."
t around 3 p.m. on a Wednesday in early July, Elbaz was in his fifth-floor atelier off the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré in Paris. It is a long, loftlike room, curtained off into sections, which are divided into workstations. In the carpeted middle section on the left side of the atelier, Elbaz, who was wearing his usual black suit with a bright green scarf worn like an ascot, had assembled his design team to work on the spring collection for 2006, which is scheduled to be shown in Paris on Oct. 9. Elbaz and three assistants - two women and a man - were sitting on plush brown velvet chairs around a repurposed dining-room table. To Elbaz's left were three bulletin boards displaying pictures of Japanese women, including geisha, drawn from books and magazines; photos of various kinds of floppy hats; and lots of drawings of high-heeled shoes.
"Spring will be the obi collection," Elbaz had told me in New York. Obis are the sashes that geisha wear to secure their kimonos. "I will start working on whatever that represents," Elbaz explained. "That's the starting point. The beauty for me is that you move on and go upside down, but you have a starting point." A year before, when he was planning spring 2005, in what was his breakthrough collection, Elbaz began with the idea of Fortuny, who in the early 20th century revolutionized evening wear with his intricately pleated, loose-fitting floor-length gowns. Elbaz then married that sensibility to Madame Grès, who was known for her Grecian-like draping. Somehow this connected to the Silk Road and women's progress, and that led him to the idea of jackets and the removal of shoulder pads to create a more refined and modern silhouette.
"It's never about going to India and saying the collection will be maharajah," Elbaz said. "And I don't have one muse, where I'm looking at her and getting high from the way she sits. I'm inspired by many women. It's about getting interested in a story. When I get the starting point for a collection, I go down to my living room in my pajamas, and I start sketching. Or I'm in a hotel room, talking on the phone or listening to CNN, and I'm sketching. I'm a lucky man - by the end of a week, I'll have 400 women in my sketchbook. "
In July, the spring collection was in its earliest stages. "Geisha are perfect," Elbaz said, now at work in his atelier, "and perfection is never interesting to me, but the search for perfection, which all women feel, is interesting. That's a timeless struggle, so why not provide women with a solution? For years, men have had uniforms, and a dress works like a uniform. You don't have to think - you zip in and zip out. And then clothes become about simplicity and form and function."
Elbaz sketched as he spoke, drawing skirts and shoes, and then, a dress with an exaggerated lower half. "This looks like a balloon with no air," he said, staring at his sketch.
"Maybe we can open the back and shape around it," an assistant said.
"As long as it doesn't look too fattening," Elbaz replied, still sketching.
"Do we want to introduce embroidery if it's in wool?" another assistant asked.
"I like the embroidery that's broken up," Elbaz said. "It should look washed and faded."
Hania Destelle, Lanvin's director of communications and one of Elbaz's closest associates, interrupted the meeting. With her was a tall blond woman. Destelle is his prototypical customer: an attractive mother of two who works. "Excuse me, Alber," she said in French. "Here is the model." In two days, Elbaz would be having seven small presentations of his precollection for spring. These would be intimate gatherings for 12 fashion editors or buyers at a time, held at the Hôtel de Crillon, with Elbaz explaining his collection and showing the clothes on four models. "What is your name," Elbaz asked the tall blond girl. "Can you walk for us?"
As she walked up and down in a brown chiffon Lanvin halter dress from two years ago, it was hard not to notice that the dress had an obi-like sash at the waist. When I mentioned this to Elbaz, he said: "Lots of elements repeat in my clothes. Art is a monologue; design is a dialogue - I look at what worked in the past, but even if a certain element remains, it always changes." Elbaz considered a shoe, which had a skyscraper-high heel. "For this collection, I want shoes and hats that look like cars," he said rather inexplicably. "I want crazy accessories, but not crazy clothes."
The meeting ended, and the design team dispersed. Elbaz picked up the shoe again. It was a jazzed-up version of a platform pump that he has made in the past. "I'm not sure if I love it or hate it," he said. "But sometimes if you love someone or hate them, it's often the same thing." Elbaz paused. It was just a shoe, but Elbaz seemed to be contemplating something other than fashion.
A few moments later, Destelle rushed back in to say that the designer Vera Wang was in the Lanvin store, which is directly across the street from the atelier. "One of the problems and joys of having the store so close by is that I'm constantly being interrupted," Elbaz said as he dashed down the elevator and through the Lanvin men's store (he does not design the men's-wear line) and through the doors of his shop, which, in some ways, is also his research center. The Paris boutique is a mecca for celebrities like Kate Moss, Sofia Coppola and Nicole Kidman as well as regular customers - all of whom Elbaz has been known to ply with macaroons from Ladurée as, say, he pins up a hem on one of his dresses.
"The coolest thing about Alber was that he wasn't pushing anything," says Natalie Portman, who wore a gorgeous pleated silk Lanvin creation to the Academy Awards last year. "I first went to him for a dress for the Golden Globes, which is a month earlier than the Oscars," she recalled recently, on the phone from Madrid. "We're both from Israel, and we were speaking in Hebrew. Most designers would have come up with a dress for me immediately, but he said he needed to think about it. And then weeks later, he sent me the Oscar dress. The dress was sexy in the way that a confident woman is sexy - it was understated, but still alluring."