PARIS — On Sunday night in a Paris fizzing with
post-lockdown euphoria, in a single-block street in the Marais where designer
Azzedine Alaïa once lived and worked, the first live couture week in a year and
a half began.
اضافة اعلان
The pavement was lit by klieg lights, lined by two rows of
black folding chairs, and clogged with fashion folk: movie stars (Owen Wilson,
Monica Bellucci), designers (Raf Simons of Prada; Pierpaolo Piccioli of
Valentino), and those who had once been regulars in the Alaïa kitchen (Farida
Khelfa, the model and filmmaker; Anna Coliva, the art historian and curator).
All came to see Pieter Mulier, the Belgian designer who
spent many years by the side of Simons, but had never run a house of his own,
do what many had believed could not be done after the unexpected death of Alaïa
in 2017: take on the legacy of the last great couturier of the 20th century, a
famously independent creator, and make it his own.
So did he?
No, not entirely. But he did do the right thing.
He proved he could speak Alaïa, with a sort of whistle-stop
tour through the ABC’s of the brand: the sleek cowl-like hoods, the body-con
knits, the crisp white shirting and marabou and python, the bike shorts and
corset belts, the constructivist denim and iridescent flou. The highly
controlled, sculpted volumes: sometimes billowing outward, sometimes
second-skin.
He gave it all a slight twist, swapping Alaïa’s signature
metal grommets for silver bobbles on laser-cut knits; cutting the shirts so
they curved backward at the lower ribs and then up, to form a hood like a sail
in the wind; layering sheer T-shirt dresses atop built-in bodysuits in a trompe
l’oeil tease.
He wrote a thank-you letter to Alaïa, instead of show notes.
He subsumed his own ego to the history of the house. He literally held the show
outside the front door, as if to acknowledge he was just entering. Well, maybe
for
COVID protocols too.
If it also seemed a little bit like parroting, that’s how
you start with a new language. Especially one treated as sacred tribal idiom by
so many.
At a dinner held in the courtyard of the atelier after the
show, Mulier said he had purposefully avoided the Alaïa archive, a famously
rich history of the brand, because he didn’t want to be too intimidated. (He
also said that when he was auditioning for the job — Alaïa is owned by the
Swiss luxury group Compagnie Financière Richemont — he told the executives,
“I’m not going to do sweatshirts, nylon or puffers.” Praise be.)
Instead, he paged through books of Alaïa’s work and relied
on his own memory — he said he had been obsessed with Alaïa from “about 1983 to
1996” — and on friends who had been wearing the brand for more than 20 years. You
could tell: The focus was on the silhouettes, especially of the early Alaïa
years, more than any of the increasingly intricate details of the designer’s
later work or the knife-edge exactitude; the sensuality overt, rather than
internal.
Part of the alchemy of Alaïa was the fact the designer
always put the woman first — was obsessed with how clothes felt on the body, so
that they served the person inside. They made her into a stronger, more
graceful version of herself, which often translated into an aura of power
untethered from time. That is hard to see from the outside and even harder to
replicate. To achieve it, Alaïa was uncompromising. But to a certain extent,
Mulier’s job, at least for now, is to compromise: to navigate between past and
present, between a myth and a business.
As a result, though emotion was very high on the street —
Simons, who said he knew how much pressure Mulier was feeling, kept tearing up
with pride; Mulier signed his letter to Alaïa “with all my heart” — it had not
yet fully permeated the clothes.
That’s OK. It will probably come, as Mulier relaxes into his
role, and is able to create his own vernacular, abstracting the essence of
Alaïa into new forms. Perhaps the best way to think of this collection is as a
sort of throat-clearing; a pretty glamorous hrrrggggrrruuumm. We will see what
happens next.
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