December 8, 2010
Azzedine Alaïa: The Master of the Female Form
By CATHY HORYN
ON the second floor of a former warehouse in the Marais quarter of Paris, the little man in the faded Chinese pajamas picked up the phone on the second ring. It was after 1 a.m., but few people who dialed his number at that hour expected to get a machine or a sleepy voice. They expected to get Azzedine Alaïa, the designer, and like an Arab grocery, he was open late.
A reporter was calling from New York. That evening, April 3, 2009, at a dinner in Baden-Baden, Germany, for NATO leaders and their spouses, Michelle Obama had worn a form-fitting black dress opening to a tiered skirt. Pictures of it were on the Internet. The first lady obviously loved clothes, and the media quickly got the idea that she was not going to be stuck on one or two designers and almost as quickly developed a rationale for her ever-changing wardrobe. The 50-odd labels she wore in the first year reflected a “democratic” approach.
You couldn’t blame the wire services for not knowing every designer’s signature style. So the pictures from Baden-Baden were sent without ID.
But one thing alone identified the dress as an Alaïa; well, two things. Even without the cold gleam of the first lady’s arms, it provoked the idea that a woman tends to look her most beautiful in clothes that make her look strong, not glamorous or sexy or powerful. There is a difference. Those with a vivid memory of Stephanie Seymour squatting in Richard Avedon’s 1994 portrait to plant a kiss on her favorite designer, her naked buttocks leaving her Alaïa chaps with the whooosh of an automobile in a snowbound slide, will surely debate the point that strength is the essential ingredient of an Alaïa.
And maybe so. Maybe the notion of strong-looking fashion, based on concrete methods and examples rather than abstractions and ironic statements, is dying, and there is nobody around with the grit and stamina to map the geography of a woman’s body, as he has done for last 45 years. Ballet has its technique and physical rigors. Painting has its schools. American music has its places of the heart, like the Delta; cookery, its ingredients and careful preparations. Fashion, though, gets its power and unanswerable logic from the female body, and, at roughly 70, Azzedine Alaïa is its undisputed master.
Even so, do you want to explain all this? The standard pattern of a designer interview is to give you emotional turbidity. (John Galliano, on a 2003 Dior couture show: “I want to feel it. I want to rip and tear it and cut it until the pain is in the dresses.”) Mr. Alaïa would show you how to make the dress and shut up about the rest. Not talking about it is also a way to avoid a falseness — the falseness of thinking poetic language can be applied to dressmaking. At some point you have to decide what color “pain” is, and whether it should have long sleeves or short.
Like other types of craftsmen who perform the actual work themselves — aside from designing every style, he does all the pattern-making and fittings — he’s happiest when working. He works all the time. And since he has always lived and worked under the same roof (for the last 19 years on rue de Moussy, and for much longer with his partner, Christoph von Weyhe, a painter, and a variety of dogs and cats), this is no problem. His ideal assistant is someone just like him. “He wants someone who understands his way of thinking, someone who makes him happy when he’s working and gives him feedback,” said the designer Sophie Theallet, who worked with him for a dozen years.
He has a great sense of friendship. Should she ever find herself in Paris with a free evening, Mrs. Obama would probably feel at home in his kitchen. No fuss would be made. Many of his ideas are really a continuation of his childhood in Tunisia, where his father farmed wheat, and women ran the show. For a few years in his youth, Azzedine assisted a Madame Pinot, a local midwife, delivering babies. She also taught him about fashion. So when he went to Paris in 1957, to study couture, he knew a lot about many things. Almost immediately he met a couple of prominent French families, one of whom hired him as a nanny. Eventually this brought him into contact with women who were helpful to his fashion career, like the writer Louise de Vilmorin and Arletty. “I was really lucky,” he said.
Also useful to his fashion education were the few years he designed costumes for the dancers at the Crazy Horse. “I learned a lot about women’s naked bodies at the Crazy Horse,” he once said.
His circle of friends remains eclectic, with photographers like Jean-Baptiste Mondino, and the furniture and product designer Marc Newson and his wife, Charlotte Stockdale. Not long ago, at a birthday party held at Mr. Alaïa’s for the writer Jean Daniel, I looked around at the room of heavyweights — Milan Kundera, Carlos Fuentes, Bernard-Henri Lévy — and wondered what, beyond the fate of France, could unite them.
As usual the answer was in plain sight. “Everyone,” said the model Veronica Webb, “has a woman who loves Azzedine.”
You could certainly find interview subjects with more to say about themselves. But as far as he is concerned, everything that is worth knowing can be observed. You just have to watch him work, and wait.
Jean-Paul Goude, the advertising director, and friend since the early ’80s, said: “He is very, very introverted, in fact. He can be mean to people — he’s just a human being and he gets mad. In a way, I find him calculated, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. He knows exactly what he’s doing. The silences are on purpose. He doesn’t want people to know too much.”
So how else could someone determine the identity of Mrs. Obama’s dress? The house of Alaïa, while not indifferent to press, almost never sends out a press release — of course!
On the phone he sounded pleased that she was wearing his dress, but he didn’t have much more to say. Usually he custom-makes dresses for V.I.P.’s — that’s the only way he’ll agree to dress an actress for a premiere, if she comes to Paris for fittings. But Mrs. Obama bought her dresses, and several other Alaïa pieces, at Ikram in Chicago. Through Ikram, he specially made the gray-blue dress she wore to the Nobel Prize awards.
One night a few weeks after the Baden-Baden event, Mr. Alaïa was again on the phone. This time he was in a rage. He had just discovered that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was about to open its “Model as Muse” exhibition, had left him out of the show. There was one photograph acknowledging his role, which in the ’80s, when he was called “the King of Cling,” was considerable. Also, he had been making dresses for Naomi Campbell, Ms. Seymour and four other models to wear to the opening gala. Now he told them all he didn’t want them to go near the Met that night. And, of course, knowing him as well as they did, they stayed away.
The curators’ explanation was that they didn’t think Mr. Alaïa would agree to be involved in a group show. His anger and his vigilance were entirely understandable. Ms. Campbell striding down Sunset Boulevard in his checked briefs and bra top, Bruce Weber’s athletic shots of knit dresses on the Santa Monica beach, Marie-Sophie Wilson as Arletty in Peter Lindbergh’s grainy Paris images — these summed up an entire era.
In 2000, when I wrote a long article about Mr. Alaïa, François Lesage, the embroiderer, said, “It’s easier to look at Azzedine’s place in the fashion world than to explain it.” At the time he was just emerging from a tough time. He had lost his beloved sister to cancer; Arletty also died. (“He went into mourning the way someone does in a Marquez novel,” Ms. Webb said.) On top of everything, he had money troubles. Deliveries of collections, already slow, became very slow. A friend suggests he may have looked at the excitement being created by big luxury brands like Gucci and “not felt good enough.”
Then, with Carla Sozzani, the Milan retailer, involved, Prada invested in his company. Delivery schedules were beefed up. A new shoe line was an immediate hit. In 2007, without fanfare, the Swiss luxury group Richemont stepped in and bought Alaïa, assuming 100 percent control and creating, at his request, a foundation that would preserve his enormous, and enormously valuable, archive.
Buying such a small company (estimated annual sales: $34 million) tied to the talents of its founder may be risky. On the other hand, the Alaïa name hasn’t been sullied. It hasn’t been pushed into the mainstream, like some luxury brands in recent years, nor put into service of a fast-fashion giant. And the clothes keep getting better and better. “The sell-throughs have been extremely good,” Martha Wikstrom, chief executive of Richemont’s fashion businesses, said, adding: “Our goal is not to tell Azzedine what to do. It’s to help him pursue what he’s interested in doing.”
In a way, Mr. Alaïa’s place in the fashion world has remained constant while everything around him has changed. Many brands have moved away from extravagant shows or conceptual clothes and have embraced wearable styles. But Mr. Alaïa always made clothes that could go in the street and, owning to their precise execution, “make you feel great inside,” as the editor Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele said. If a lot of new fashion doesn’t look so special or worth the price, it’s usually because the design doesn’t have a sense of being resolved.
Not long ago, Mr. Mondino did a shoot in Paris of nine young designers, and they all identified Mr. Alaïa and Martin Margiela as their lodestars. But without Mr. Alaïa’s precision, his mastery of craft and his ease around women’s bodies, this will only lead to bad parodies.
“It’s commendable and really reassuring that there are people who still work like that,” Mr. Newson said. “It’s kind of an anachronism, and so is the concept of the fashion designer.” More and more, things will be made differently, simpler. There won’t be the demand for a jacket that is the result of hours of careful adjustment and pinning on a body. Yet, Mr. Newson regrets the loss of a thought process connected with that skill.
One Saturday night in October, Mr. Alaïa was in his studio fitting some spring clothes — a short-sleeve black dress and a knit tube skirt — on a model. There wasn’t one quality that made the dress modern-looking. Rather, it was the combination of the newness of the micro-dot cotton lace, the narrow fit of the minimalist shape, the little pleat below the rear, and the digital pop of red from the underslip that made the dress look modern. After giving a side seam a tug, Mr. Alaïa turned his attention to the knit skirt. He didn’t like how the waistband fit.
Next to him was Silvia Bocchese, whose factory in Italy has been making his knits for 30 years. She likes to deliver the samples in person, so she can see what he wants adjusted, and then she goes back and explains the changes to her knitters. She has worked with a lot of designers, she said.
“What is really the difference is that I have this direct contact with him,” she said. “In the other ateliers, I deal with an assistant. In all these years, he is really the only one.”
