How does Azzedine Alaia do it? I think there are several things to keep in mind about Alaia and his method of working.
I use that phrase because, although Alaia has a very successful business, with annual sales in the neighborhood of $18 million, I think he will always be more interested in how the work gets accomplished. This is not to say he doesn’t want to make money, but I think from the outset of his career, in the mid 60s, he made everything adhere to certain work standards. There would be no compromise. Listen, Alaia still does the marketing for his house. If he’s going somewhere in the Marais, he walks. How many designers of his experience and stature do that today?
There are so many prisons in life today — the prison of success and material want, for one. Alaia is completely free. He’s protected himself from ever being in a situation where he doesn’t have absolute control over his work. And it’s about the work: making clothes, thinking about the technical solutions, relating all these things to the contemporary world. I honestly believe that Alaia worries that he might not have the five minutes he needs to accomplish something great. Of course, he would take more than five minutes. But my point is: what if five minutes were all he needed and he had to do something else instead?
Wherever he has lived, in whatever period, Alaia has essentially done things the same way. He arrived in Paris from Tunisia in 1957. For the next 10 years or so, he lived with a number of wealthy families, doing cooking and babysitting, and making dresses for the women. One of his early clients helped him open his first atelier, in a tiny apartment on the Rue de Bellechasse. He held his first shows at Rue de Bellechasse, with editors sitting on the floor, anywhere they could. He stayed there until the late 70s or early 80s, when he moved to Rue du Parc-Royal in the Marais. One of his sidelines in the 70s, briefly, was to make the costumes for the dancers at the Crazy Horse, a job that entailed measuring and fitting the women for their g-strings. This would make you overcome any inhibitions you might have the naked female body, not that Alaia had any. But if you think of the number of women in Alaia’s family, his mother, grandmother, and his twin sister, and the women he lived with in Paris, and what he observed about their movements and tastes, the experience of the Crazy Horse would have certainly added to his understanding of women. No wonder his clothes make women feel so self-assured.
And I think this explains why so many of the supermodels are drawn to him, and knew him from such an early age. Stephanie Seymour was 15 when she first modeled for Alaia. Veronica Webb, who grew up in Detroit, lived with Alaia when she was 19, at Rue du Parc-Royal. Naomi Campbell calls him Papa and he treats her like a daughter. She always has a place in his home. He made Seymour’s dresses for her wedding, to Peter Brant. On a pillar in his current studio, at Rue de Moussy, which he has owned since 1987, he has photographs of these and other women and their children. This is not incidental to the fact that Alaia’s clothes, while being incredibly seductive and beautiful, are also respectful. He never pushed the limits of taste the way Versace or Mugler did. In fact, he was the opposite. His taste is like a dam. It is absolutely sound. This, and his mastery of craft, is what gives him his special power and it is, I suspect, what other, younger designers don’t sufficiently grasp. He is absolutely sure of himself. Yet his taste is not a static thing, set in a period that time soon forgot. He continually subjects his ideas about style to what is going on in the street. Veronica Webb told me recently that she and Alaia went to H & M in Paris this summer to buy something for his niece, and they were talking about how the young women looked and the prices for stuff. But, she said, “We talk about it all the time.”
I first met Alaia in 1999, at the urging of Carlyne Cerf, who in the 80s, as an editor at French Elle, had been photographed by Bill Cunningham going to the Paris shows in her Alaia outfit. Bill told me that as far as he was concerned, that was the beginning of the 80s — seeing Cerf and two other editors from Elle in their stretchy black Alaias. Anyway, I went to see him. Rue de Moussy was quite different then. A lot of editors, like Cerf and Gilles Bensimon and Michael Roberts, as well as the stylist Joe McKenna, still came to see him. But the business had slowed down a lot. He still had a number of retail accounts, prominently Barneys, which took his clothes whenever he delivered them, no matter how late. Gene Pressman insisted on it. And, by the way, in response to a question posted by someone on the blog, Alaia has always done made to measure. He does both, haute couture and ready to wear. Suzy Menkes once called him the “greatest couturier who never was.” She just meant that, though he’s not officially recognized as a couturier, he obviously is one. (In 1994, Ingrid Sischy wrote a good piece about Alaia for The New Yorker that deals mainly with his life during the 90s. The piece is comprehensive as far as personal history, technique and the funny, humanistic atmosphere at Rue de Moussy, and less revealing, I think, on how he relates to women.) Two events seemed to have a heavy influence on Alaia. One was the death of his sister, in 1992, of cancer, and the other was the cost of renovating the buildings at Rue de Moussy. He stopped doing shows after his sister’s death.
When I saw him in 1999, I had the feeling he was beginning to emerge from these pressures. And he was always making clothes. I think because he had a reputation for not showing regularly, people concluded that he wasn’t busy. In the 90s, he produced some amazing clothes, like the Tati-inspired checks and the Grecian pleated mini dresses and the leopard knits.
One day in 1999 he took me downstairs to see his archive. I had to plead uncle. The rails of clothes seemed to go on forever. He used to pull out his patterns, all of which he made himself, and try to explain markings to me. On another occasion, I saw the beginnings of a black wool jacket that would have a back of black alligator skin. It took him two years to finish the jacket. In the meantime, he worked on other things. I think in a lot of ways Alaia’s methods of working make him comparable to a great poet or an artist. I think he’s driven to express things as precisely as he can, and to connect his expression to other disciplines, like science. Is it obvious to him that he’s doing this? I doubt it.
I’ve been thinking lately about how he stayed with ruching for more than three years. He started with some simple silk crepe dresses that had single channels of ruching, the cords left to stream down the back of the dress. Then he did some summer dresses in silk polka dot with wider channels of ruching going over the butt (one of his primal female coordinates). Then he made some loose tops and skirts in black mousseline that combined panels of cream lace and ruching. Then he made a cotton printed mini dress that was entirely ruched. Naomi Campbell wore it. It was as though he had created a distinct genre of ruching, each piece advancing in intensity to the next. Isn’t there an equivalent in mathematics to this?
In the past few years Alaia has found financial stability and a new audience, thanks in part to the Prada investment, which ended last week with his buy-back, and in part to individuals like Carla Sozzani and Fabio Zambernardi, the creative director of Prada, who works so well with Alaia on shoes and bags. The house at Rue de Moussy looks spiffy, and there’s an extra table in the kitchen to accommodate the new workers he hired.
It should be clear that Alaia offers an antidote to what troubles a lot of us about the fashion industry at the moment. That’s why people are drawn to him. He is not in a hurry. He has taken the time to learn the techniques, and he insists on controlling every aspect of the creative process. By his example he says that anyone can do this. The question now is: Will a young designer do this? Will he or she be inspired not merely by Alaia’s past fashion but also by his ongoing discipline and leadership? Will they take the five minutes?
(the bags are crazy!!)
