But let’s get back to Azzedine Alaïa! Like a sculptor – he studied sculpture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Tunis – he knows how to reconstruct, like a true artist, a woman’s body. How to correct its imperfections. Highlight its qualities and realities. Allude to its most desirable aspects, the sensuality in each curve and counter-curve. With the mixture of violence, decency, and flames that pound out the rhythm of Eastern design. This Tunisian native finds little tricks in the cuts and experiments with new materials.
It was one of his compatriots, the lovely Simone Zehrfuss, wife of architect Bernard Zehrfuss, who would initiate him into the dos and donts of the elegant and demanding Parisian high society. After two seasons with couturier Guy Laroche, he moved in to the home of the Comtesse de Blégiers temporarily. Thanks to these connections, little by little, he would meet, admire, and dress up women as exceptional as Louise de Vilmorin, Greta Garbo, Cécile de Rothschild, and Arletty. Encouraged by his friend Thierry Mugler, he presented his first labeled collection in 1979. His work is characterized by a delicate and sensual working of leather and be-stretch jersey fabric that he had specially fabricated for his collections that he draped over many a body. “When I work the garment, it has to turn around the body, from the side and from behind.” The snake zippers around his dresses that subtly reveal the body to indiscreet gazes, the stitches that highlight the curves… Alaïa emphasizes women’s shapes. Notably the fall of the loins and the buttocks. Alaïa considers the posterior to be a woman’s most important body part. Or at least the one that incites the most desire in the men who follow them. By inventing new morphologies through a simple game of complex stitches, Alaïa became the couturier behind a body of work that transcends time. The man behind the black Chinese jacket – made of sateen or silk – with a simple pair of pants worked like an artisan; he is one of the rare few to master each stage of a garment’s creation, from the pattern to the cut.
A collector of old suits and dresses from great couturiers that he worshipped, Madeleine Vionnet, Balenciaga… Alaïa knows how to uncover their secrets. He studies them as if he were in school. On the architecture of clothing through the centuries, Alaïa knows almost everything. This knowledge tied to a novel and inventive mind are the foundations of a unique savoir-faire that, adapted to contemporary demands along with new fabrication techniques and materials, gives us the essential Azzedine Alaïa style.
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