Designer’s team keeps brand alive
After Azzedine Alaïa’s death, many in fashion wondered what would become of line
When the designer Azzedine Alaïa — the last of the great couturiers, a man who could make a dress from sketch to stitch — died unexpectedly in November of a heart attack, the fashion world was first shocked, then deeply saddened, then preoccupied by the inevitable question: What would happen to the brand?
Perhaps, people thought, the house would take its cues from Cristóbal Balenciaga, a man to whom Alaïa often was compared, who wanted his name to die with him. Perhaps Alaïa would close its doors without its founder.
Or maybe, they thought, Compagnie Financière Richemont, the Swiss luxury group that owns Alaïa, would do what so many other conglomerates have done and install a new star designer. The name Nicolas Ghesquière was whispered by the runway rumourmongers. Think again. As the couture shows dawn in Paris and a generation of post-retirementage designers, including Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld, begin to face — or deny — their own mortality, the house has come up with a different proposal. If there is a model for its strategy, it might be Le Corbusier.
On Sunday, the exhibition “Azzedine Alaïa: Je Suis Couturier” will open in Alaïa’s Paris showroom at 18 rue de la Verrerie, the site of the designer’s last couture show, giving him a living presence during the collections. It will take the place of a more formal, fashion-centric memorial and will be free to the public until June 10.
It will also be the first salvo in what is a co-ordinated effort by Alaïa’s partners to keep his brand alive and functioning in his image and on his terms, if without his physical presence. A precollection — what Alaïa called the “Intemporels” — which he designed before his death, will be sold to buyers this month, and the main collection of fall ready-to-wear and accessories in March.
Afterward, there are enough products, samples and ideas in the archives, said Carla Sozzani, owner of the10 Corso Como boutique and one of Alaïa’s closest collaborators, for the studio he left behind to create new seasonal collections “for generations.”
“I think this is what he would have wanted,” she said. Despite the fact that Alaïa was 82, he had not exactly strategized for the future, and there never really had been any discussions of formal succession.
“He thought he was eternal,” Sozzani said. But while not focused on the mechanics of the house, he was “very concerned with legacy.”
To that end, he and his partner, the painter Christoph von Weyhe, created the Azzedine Alaïa Association in 2007, a non-profit that will be administered by Sozzani, Olivier Saillard (former director of the Palais Galliera, one of Paris’s two fashion museums), and von Weyhe. That took place at the same time that a majority stake in the company was being sold to Richemont.
“We were reorganizing his life, and he wanted to protect his work and archives,” Sozzani said. According to von Weyhe, Alaïa set aside enough money to endow the association, which is in the process of applying for more formal foundation status.
Alaïa had been saving his own work since the 1980s, and he has been collecting the work of designers he admired for even longer, including pieces from Charles James, Paul Poiret, Vionnet, Chanel, Madame Grès and many others. Neither Sozzani nor Saillard could venture a guess as to how many pieces there were, but together they occupied five floors and approximately 1,370 square metres in Alaïa’s compound on rue de la Verrerie. To create more room there, a portion of the archive is being moved to a building near rue de la République, which has an additional 914 square metres.
“I never saw such archives in my life,” said Saillard, who is effectively the association’s curator. “He has the most important private collection devoted to the history of fashion. For 20 years I used to see him at auctions, and we curators were all very jealous because he always bought the masterpiece we wanted, and he always refused to show them.”
And it wasn’t just clothes. Alaïa collected furniture from designers including Pierre Paulin, Jean Prouvé, Shiro Kuramata and Marc Newson, as well as books. It is the clothes, however, and the patterns, fabrics, buttons and sketches — the record of his creative process — that will form the basis of the continuing life of the house.
“He kept everything,” Sozzani said.