Featured Post

Blog Archive

Like Us

Like us !!!

Contact Form

Name

Email *

Message *

Labels

Instagram

Labels

Featured Post

Featured Slider

Popular Posts

Pages

Navigation Menu

Popular Posts

LATEST POSTS

Skip to main content

Azzedine Alaïa, Fashion’s Most Independent Designer, Is Dead at 82


Azzedine Alaïa, one of the greatest and most uncompromising designers of the 20th and 21st centuries, died on Saturday in Paris. He was 82.
His company said the cause was a heart attack.
Known as a sculptor of the female form, and worn by women from Michelle Obama to Lady Gaga, Mr. Alaïa was equally famous for his rejection of the fashion system and his belief that it had corrupted the creative power of what could be an art form.
He rarely hewed to the official show calendar, preferring to reveal his work when he deemed it ready, as opposed to when retailers or press demanded it.
Instead he built his own system, and family of supporters, and since the turn of the millennium had become an increasingly important voice for the value of striving to perfect and explore a single proprietary aesthetic, and against giving in to the relentless pressure to produce collections.
His kitchen, where he was famous for holding free-flowing lunch and dinner gatherings, for which he often cooked, was his soapbox. There he would regale guests — who could include designers, Kardashians, the artist Julian Schnabel, the architect Peter Marino and seamstresses from his ateliers — long into the night with opinions, stories and exhortations.
Continue reading the main story
Short — at least compared to supermodels like Naomi Campbell, who called him “Papa,” and Farida Khelfa — he was always attired in a uniform of black Chinese cotton pajamas. He was famous for working long hours alone, bent over patterns and pieces of fabric, with National Geographic programs playing on the wide screen TV nearby.
He was also mischievous: He often lied about his age, once told a journalist that his mother was a Swedish model, and like to hide from his staff members and then startle them by jumping out with a whistle. Prone to hold grudges, he could also be extraordinarily generous.
Photo
From the Alaïa fall 2017 couture collection, shown in Paris. CreditValerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times
Mr. Alaïa dedicated his life to the belief that fashion was more than just garments; to him, they were as much an element in the empowerment of women and of a broader cultural conversation.
An exhibit of his work in 2015 at the Villa Borghese in Rome, where his gowns held their own among the Caravaggios and Berninis, suggested that he had achieved that goal.
Azzedine Alaïa was born in Tunis, Tunisia, on Feb. 26, 1935 (though some biographical sources list his birth year as 1939 or 1940). His father ran a wheat farm outside the city.
Azzedine became interested in art and design at a young age.
“I was helping Madame Pinot, a midwife that helped in giving birth to my whole family,” he recalled in an interview with the fashion magazine The Ground in 2011. “I told her that I liked to draw. She gave me books, pamphlets to art exhibitions, and my first book of Picasso.”
Soon she registered him at the School of Fine Arts in Tunis, he said, “against my father’s will.”
Photo
Styles from the Alaïa ready-to-wear collection for Spring 2014. CreditValerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times
From there, with help from a well-connected friend of the cousin’s, he went to Paris, to work for Dior, in 1957. Living in the “chambre de bonne” of Comtesse Nicole de Blégiers, he paid his rent by making clothes for her and babysitting her children.
Word spread, and he became an inside secret of the great and good of French society; clients included the writer Louise de Vilmorin, Cécile and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, of the banking family, and the actress Arletty. He opened his own maison in 1979.
Mr. Alaïa introduced his first ready-to-wear collection in 1980 and was soon hailed as “the king of cling” — though his garments were much more than that: He used leather and knits to shape and support the body, transforming it into the best version of itself.
Though his aesthetic fell out of fashion with the advent of deconstructed minimalism in the 1990s, Mr. Alaïa never allowed himself to be distracted by the trends of others, and by the year 2000 acolytes began returning to his atelier, a complex of buildings on Rue de Moussy in the Fourth Arrondissement, where he lived, worked and cooked.
In 2007, Compagnie Financière Richemont bought a majority stake in the business, allowing it to expand at its own pace. A perfume was introduced and store expansion planned, and by last year Mr. Alaïa had more than 300 points of sale globally. His closest collaborator was Carla Sozzani, owner of the influential boutique 10 Corso Como.
Beyond the runway, Mr. Alaïa created work for the ballet and the opera, began holding art exhibitions in 2004 in the space that also houses his showroom (regular programming began in 2015 with an exhibition by the Syrian poet Adonis) and was planning a bookstore.
He is survived by his partner, the painter Christoph von Weyhe; and nieces and nephews.
Mr. Alaïa returned to the couture calendar in July after six years. In the audience were Jack Lang, the former French minister of culture; Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, former first lady of France (and one-time Alaïa model); Isabelle Huppert, the actress; Marc Newson, the industrial designer; and Fabrice Hergott, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.
Mr. Alaïa had become the equivalent of a national treasure, and everyone was there to honor him.

Comments