Azzedine Alaïa and the way he shaped womenswear

PARIS — “The designers who have made a lasting impression on the history of fashion are those who have concentrated on celebrating and liberating the body. Of all contemporary creators, it is Alaïa who has best embodied this spirit since the 1980s, using precise seams and darts to produce a silhouette that has become his hallmark,” says Olivier de Saillard, director of the Galliera museum and the exhibit’s curator. “He drew inspiration from the spirited style and arrogance of personalities like Arletty and Louise de Vilmorin.”

“Alaïa,” an exhibit chronicling the designer’s career and influence in fashion, recently opened at Palais Galliera, Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris. The exhibit goes through the designer’s history, designs, techniques, inspirations — and his penchant for women, including famous actresses.

Azzedine Alaïa was born in Tunisia and attended the country’s École des Beaux-arts. “I used to spend my nights oversewing dresses for a local dressmaker in order to pay for my school equipment. I learned the different stitches by doing my sister Hafida’s sewing exercises because she wasn’t very keen on manual skills,” says Alaïa in the exhibition catalogue. Soon after, the designer finished his studies and was encouraged to move to Paris by a family friend.

Alaïa met the French actress Arletty in Paris in 1960. “She’s the one who gave me the idea of making skin-tight dresses. She was used to adjusting the volume of her skirt with a pin. ‘It falls too well, she used to say. ‘It has to be skewed somewhere.’” Towards 1971, he was inspired by Greta Garbo: “She came with a friend, Cécile de Rothschild, and wanted me to make a very full- bodied coat. I remember some fitting sessions and measuring sessions. The coat was never big enough for her taste. At a time when everything was tight-fitting, the 1970s, I had to make an immense, navy-blue coat for her, with turned-up sleeves. . . In the 1980s and 1990s, I often presented huge coats with generous shoulders, a definite nod to Garbo, to her inimitable and avant-gardist style.” When he met Louise de Vilmorin, he was further schooled in fashion: “Meeting her, I realized that Parisian chic was all about the little details. One evening, when Louise de Vilmorin was supposed to go to a dinner, she asked me to help her put the finishing touches to her outfit. She remembered that she had seen a concierge wearing a cardigan from a department store like Prisunic so we bought it. We replaced the buttons with something more elaborate in metal and put a long ordinary chain around her neck that she rolled up and plunged into a pocket. It was a demonstration in just a few seconds of her inimitable sense of style, and she got a lot of envious looks that evening.”

Over the course of his career, the designer has created collections that include leather or waxed fabrics perforated with eyelets, skirts laced at the back, metal zippers running from the neckline to the hemline, tight and structured leather suits, seamed stretch jersey dresses, leather tube dress with asymmetrical folds revealing the naked skin, stretch jersey hood dresses and coats with hood collars and reversible boleros with strips of mink. “Alaïa fashioned a new body, like a sculptor working with muslin and leather.  Inventing new shapes out of simple interplay between complex stitchings, Alaïa became the creator of a timeless body of work. His influence on today’s fashion is fundamental,” says Saillard.

In 1986, Alaïa presented Naomi Campbell in her first fashion show (she was 16).  “Naomi Campbell, Farida Khelfa, Veronica Webb, Stephanie Seymour, Marie-Sophie Wilson, I am grateful to them all for accompanying me through all the research and the long posing, fitting and tweaking sessions. If I don’t have models before my eyes I have no ideas. I need to see their bodies near me,” says the designer. He acknowledges the profound influence women have had on him: “I have never followed fashion. Women have always dictated my behavior… I make clothes, women make fashion.”

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“Alaïa” runs until Jan. 26, 2014 at the Palais Galliera, Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris. The exhibit is extended in the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris in the Salle Matisse.