In 1999, the adept appearance editor Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele apprenticed me to go and accommodated Azzedine Alaïa. I had afresh abutting the Times, and I got the faculty from Carlyne’s accent that not alone would I be in for a amusement but that few journalists were visiting Alaïa. One of the certainties of the appearance apple — of any world, I assumption — is that anybody has his moment and again the barrage accouterment to accession new. Fame lasts for no one, Ingrid Sischy empiric at the end of a contour of Alaïa, in 1994. That piece, alleged “The Outsider,” ran in The New Yorker and featured an Avedon photo of the supermodel Stephanie Seymour angle bottomward bare-assed in a brace of Alaïa chaps to bulb a kiss on the diminutive designer, who looked startled.
By then, the appearance apple had confused on to the minimalist Helmut Lang, as able-bodied as a new beachcomber of British aptitude — Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano. Alaïa had allegorical feuds with Vogue, Women’s Wear Daily, and others. To be sure, Alaïa still had his fans, but attributable to a alternation of business and claimed setbacks, in accurate the afterlife of his admired sister, Alaïa took best and best to bear his clothes to stores. Indeed, they hardly accustomed in season, and that was a botheration for the added accumulated appearance business. One of the few retailers who would delay for his Alaïa commitment was Gene Pressman of Barneys. As he told Sischy, “When it arrives, I’ll booty it, because he doesn’t accomplish mistakes. He makes classics.”
So, for the aboriginal time in my career, I went to see Alaïa in his flat in the Marais. Housed in a aloft barn of the BHV administration store, the flat was anon aloft the Alaïa abundance and beneath Alaïa’s clandestine apartment. There was, in accession to a warren of ateliers, a actual ample appearance amplitude affected in affected ironwork, and it was there that I saw one of Westwood’s aboriginal Paris shows. Alaïa had loaned the amplitude to his friend. But I had never apparent an Alaïa show. I had absent best of the ’80s, aback Alaïa was dubbed the “king of cling” for his ample dresses and aciculate leathers, and every cool in the apple would fly in for his shows, which were never captivated at the aforementioned time as the blow of the collections. Unfortunately, I never formed for a bi-weekly that followed Alaïa time, so I never saw Naomi Campbell or Veronica Webb or Stephanie strut bottomward the runway, their clothes still balmy from Alaïa’s iron. He did aggregate himself and, as Gene said, he didn’t accomplish mistakes.
Alaïa, who came up to about my sternum, greeted me and led me up the ambagious aback stairway with worn, asperous treads to a flat that basically looked like a cyclone had appear through. There was being everywhere — racks of clothes, bags of boxes adjoin the walls, rolls of fabric, things advance above tables and added awash beneath them. Near a brick pillar, covered with photos of cine legends (clients, in some cases) and snapshots of models and their kids, was Alaïa’s worktable, covered with debris and patterns and pins. Abutting to it was a behemothic TV set, because he admired to accumulate it on as he formed backward into the night, usually accomplished two or three in the morning. Behind Alaïa’s table was a wall-length mirror. It was in that attenuated space, amid the table and some boxes and usually a dress rack, that he conducted his aboriginal accessories on a abode model, attractive at her absorption and again aback at the bolt that he was abstraction and pinning with his hands, a brace of girlishly blush glasses pushed up on his nose.
In added words, it was in that narrow, unimpressive amplitude that some of the best aboriginal appearance of the late-20th and 21st centuries was created. Alaïa admired designing for the changeable form, amalgam his apparel anon on the body. Actual few designers do their own fittings, abundant beneath accomplish their own patterns, but he did. From his aboriginal flat in Paris, on the Rue de Bellechasse, he fabricated clothes for a growing accumulation of adherent customers. He becoming their assurance in the way couturiers acclimated to work. No armies of assistants, no aerial publicists, aloof an attraction with actual animate to a woman’s body, the way she absolved in the street.
Another affair that set Alaïa afar was his adulation of technique. Like a scientist in a lab, he would agreement with a accustomed couture address — ruching, say — until he was annoyed that he had explored it to its analytic end. With the ruching (a action of acquisition bolt into elegant, coiled pleats), anniversary appearance of the accomplishment produced absurd results. He started with alluringly simple dresses in cottony ache with conceivably four distinct channels of ruching. The abutting time I saw Alaïa, he had added channels. Eventually, he fabricated a dress absolutely of ruching. It was the craziest thing, about a doll-size dress, except it stretched. Though he was accepted for his caterpillar dresses and adult knits, he had a accurate allowance for dressmaking and acid on the bias, which put him in the aforementioned chic as Madeleine Vionnet and Cristobal Balenciaga. Whatever Alaïa did, it looked avant-garde — and above trends.
I didn’t break continued that aboriginal visit. Frankly, I was a little afflicted and my French was angrily inadequate. But I knew that aggregate I saw, the little man in the atramentous Chinese pajamas, the clutter, the crepitate of the board floors, the cat comatose on the table, the accession of the wine, was absolutely different and would one day vanish. I capital to address about it. I asked Alaïa if I could appear to his flat anniversary time I was in Paris over the years and aloof sit and watch him work. He agreed.
He said, “My abode is your house.”
I can alone acquaint you that he kept his word, in the best abstruse sense. For the abutting 18 years, his abode was my house. And he continued that amore and advantage to many, abounding people. And after alarum or expectation. I anticipate that spirit came anon from his own accomplishments in Tunisia, the accurateness of his family. In any case, he never absent it. He knew a abominable cardinal of people. I bethink accessory a banquet in the appearance amplitude for a arresting French political journalist, and gazing at the accumulating of writers and thinkers in the room, including Bernard-Henri Levy. They all knew Alaïa and his boyfriend, the painter Christoph von Weyhe.
Last month, as the Paris collections were ambagious down, I went to a banquet in Azzedine’s kitchen, acclaimed for its ad-lib gatherings and delicious, aloof aliment — generally able by Azzedine himself. Carla Sozzani, his abutting acquaintance and business collaborator, was there. So was the Milan arranger Emanuela Schmeidler, the stylist Joe McKenna, and the adept Italian Vogue art administrator Luca Stoppini. I could bethink added nights in the kitchen, with Naomi, or Kanye West, or Marc Newson, or Rei Kawakubo.
But that night in October was special, the acquisition of a tribe. We laughed hard, and Azzedine seemed actual jolly. If he was in poor health, he did not appearance it. Around midnight, he absolved me out to my car, through the half-dark shop, and asked aback I would be abiding to Paris. Maybe in January, I said. He told me to appear and see him.
As we hugged, I said, “Of course, my friend.”
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