Whiteknuckle adventures in the land of Alaïa
The first time I interviewed the designer Azzedine Alaïa, who died this week, we were about 20 minutes into our encounter, either side of a large desk in his Paris studio, when a disembodied female voice interrupted our conversation. It was Veronica Webb, the model, then about 24, who had been crouching the whole time, nestled against Alaïa’s shins, hidden from view.
That was back in the late Eighties, and it set a template for oddness that he never failed to live up to. I was always a little nervous around him, to be honest, because he could turn against journalists simply because he didn’t like their voices. In another interview, a minion scuttled in to announce that Victoria Beckham had arrived to buy some clothes and would love to talk to him. Now, Beckham is a very vocal fan and collector of Alaïa’s and had told me how much he’d inspired her initially in her own collections. If this made an iota of an impression on Alaïa, it was not obvious. “And?” he inquired, eyes narrowing like Dame Maggie Smith doing a vintage Dowager scrutinising a calling card. “I think she’d like to see you,” said the minion nervously. “But I’m busy,” retorted Alaïa, with mock incredulity. “Can’t you see I’m being interviewed?”
To be fair, rebuffed Victoria was in good company. He once kept the King of Morocco waiting while he rustled up supper and failed to attend the Met Gala he was supposed to be co-hosting with Anna Wintour. His feuds with, inter alia, Wintour, Stephanie Seymour, the supermodel, and Karl Lagerfeld (“One day he does photography, the next he does adverts for Coca-cola. I would rather die than see my face in a car advertisement”) were the stuff of journalistic dreams. In a world strictly policed by PR agents and heavily drugged by scripted responses, Alaïa’s metaphorical nose-thumbing was an exhilarating, sometimes white-knuckle ride. “It’s exhausting,” confided Katy Grand, stylist extraordinaire and editor of Love magazine, whose wedding dress he designed (if scoring a ticket to his show was a coup, engaging his interest in your wedding gown was a masterstroke, though not without its price). “He suggested – no insisted – I lose weight before the wedding. I lost 10 pounds and went back feeling very pleased and he looked me over and said, well you could win first prize in a pig competition. So I lost more. But it’s not as if I didn’t know what I was getting into. And he was right. The dress had no boning or corseting… he worked for about 10 hours non-stop on it. At the final fitting he looked me up and down and told me I looked beautiful.”
At the centre of all the Alaïa brouhaha were the clothes. From the early body-con dresses, to those delicious animal print pencil skirts and corsets (he single-handedly revived leopard print) and from wondrously contoured fishtail hems to impeccably tailored coats and jackets, he found an idiom that was his own – albeit much copied subsequently. Although there was nothing overtly theatrical about his clothes, they were nonetheless dramatic. Minimalist in appearance they were fabulously extravagant in the time it took to make them, beautifully, painstakingly constructed. When you bought, as I did, hyperventilating slightly over the prices, you at least knew they were built to outlast you. No wonder he couldn’t stick to conventional delivery dates.
Throughout his four-decade career, he refused to join the fashion system, preferring to have his catwalk shows and deliver his collections to stores as and when he felt. Sometimes this independence seemed like petulant grandstanding, but journalists accepted it because they felt honoured to be invited and buyers knew that whatever he finally chose to sell to them would be snapped up.
“With Azzedine, you take what you’re given – and when you’re given it,” Joan Burstein, the founder of Browns boutique explained, fondly recalling an earlier instance when all he had was a range of grommeted leather gauntlets. “He wasn’t one to deliver at the same time as everyone else,” she said. “Mind you, they were magnificent gloves. We sold out immediately.”
I got a little taste of his maverick tendencies when, after months of negotiations, he agreed to a follow-up interview (some 15 years after the first). “Monsieur Alaïa is not very well,” chirped his PR when I arrived at midday, having caught a punishingly early train from London. “There was a party here last night… sorry we didn’t call you. Come back next week, oui?” Er, non. Next week was Christmas. The PR scurried off, returning 20 minutes later to report that miraculously, Monsieur Alaïa was feeling a little better. “He will see you shortly.”
Anticipating an invalid barely able to speak, I was ushered through the loft style shop, past the portrait that his friend Julian Schnabel had painted of him, and through a door into the kitchen, where the so-called Titan of Tight (a reference to his early, bodyconscious silhouettes, not his frugality) was overseeing lunch preparations. He had changed somewhat since our previous encounter: a one-time student of sculpture, it was almost as if he’d been sculpting his face. He may have had some cosmetic surgery, which seemed strange in someone who appeared to have set his own appearance to one side.
About 14 of us sat down to eat, including members of his team and a couple of loyal mother and daughter clients. The Tunisian-born Alaïa’s couscous cuisine was the stuff of legends, as was the retinue of Yorkshire terriers that were never far from his feet and the blue Mao suits he always wore. He had around 400 and they cost him €30 (£26) from the local market, although Rei Kawakubo sometimes ran some up for him.
The models adored him, drawn like moths to cashmere. They walked in his shows in return for clothes and used his apartment above the studio as a not-always-temporary crash-pad. A 15-year-old Naomi Campbell moved in for a few weeks and stayed three years. Despite speaking no French (and refusing to learn English) the pair forged a lifelong friendship. In a post-weinstein framework, these gnomic pacts between the tiny, worldly designer and the Amazonian ingénue models may seem a little creepy. Even pre-weinstein, they looked unusual and there was certainly a Svengalian subtext, but for all his mischief and biting observations, he could be kind and nurturing.
With eerily off-timing, last Wednesday I had breakfast with a colleague who had just started working with Alaïa, and we began to plot my next interview, which we had pencilled in for January. Neither of us had any inkling he was ill. “There’s just one thing bothering me”, I began. “Will he turn up?” “There are no guarantees with Azzedine,” she replied, none too reassuringly, “but if you’re OK to take things on the hoof, I think it will be all right. And, we can shop while we wait.”
Two days later, he was dead. Unpredictable to the end.