Azzedine Alaïa
Tunisian-born fashion designer known as the ‘King of Cling’ for his sensual, figure-hugging dresses
AZZEDINE ALAIA, who has died aged between 77 and 82, was, with Giorgio Armani, the most influential fashion designer of the Eighties, and one of the industry’s few innovative talents; his use of fabric to make clothes that hugged the body earned him the epithet the “King of Cling”.
Like Coco Chanel before him, Alaïa’s genius was to use a previously overlooked material to create an entirely new mainstream fashion. Where Chanel made her name with jersey (previously reserved for men’s undergarments), Alaïa used stretchy fibres hitherto employed only for swimwear. More importantly still, Alaïa – who had no formal training – focused not on the appearance of the garment but its very construction and relationship to the body.
The results were clothes that seemed to reveal all, yet flattered by lifting and shaping. Alaïa’s dresses were seen everywhere, from the models in Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love video to Tina Turner’s outfit on the cover of Private Dancer, and efforts to imitate them gave birth to the tight, short look that characterised much of the Eighties.
The key to Alaïa’s work was that, unlike many designers, he revered women. He wanted them to revel in his sensual clothes, to be liberated by them rather than to be moulded by his vision. Models preferred to be paid by him in clothes than in cash, and his career was shaped by a series of inspirational muses and women patrons, among them Greta Garbo and Naomi Campbell.
Azzedine Alaïa was born in Tunis. His date of birth, like many other facts of his life, he came to regard as a creative possibility. Some biographical sources list his birth as February 26 1935; others give the year as 1939 or 1940. For a time he liked to tease interviewers by pretending that his mother was a Swedish model and his father Spanish, but in fact both were Tunisian Arabs, although his father, a prosperous farmer, came of an ancient Moorish family expelled from Andalucia following the reconquest of Granada at the end of the 15th century.
Alaïa’s parents separated when he was young and he was brought up largely by his maternal grandparents. The chief artistic influences on him as a boy were the cinemas and cabarets of Tunis and the French fashion catalogues of a friend of his mother’s. At 15, he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-arts in Tunis, intending to train as a sculptor, but he soon realised that he lacked the talent to excel in the medium. Instead, having learned from his sister how to sew dresses to make pocket money, he concentrated on this, teaching himself to copy the latest Parisian fashions for the grandes dames of Tunis society.
When he was 17 he obtained, through the mother of a friend, a placement in the atelier of Christian Dior in Paris. This lasted only five days, however, as resentment against North Africans was at its height because of the Algerian war, and defects in his papers which might have been overlooked were not.
He subsequently worked for Guy Laroche for two seasons, and then for almost two decades made a niche for himself as the housekeeper-cum-dressmaker to a series of rich Parisian women who recognised and mothered his talents.
The first of these was Louise de Vilmorin, the writer and former mistress of, among others, Duff Cooper and André Malraux. As well as teaching a bemused Alaïa to play croquet, she introduced him to her friends, many of whom were to become his patrons, among them the actress Arletty, Cecile de Rothschild and Garbo. In the late Fifties, the prêt-à-porter revolution had yet to happen, and the belle monde – who might need to change outfits three or four times a day – still bought its clothes couture, and in large quantities. By the mid-seventies, Alaïa’s skill was well known in the fashion industry, if not outside it, and he regularly undertook commissions for other designers such as Thierry Mugler. One such project was for the Crazy Horse cabaret, which asked him to design costumes for its showgirls. “I learned a lot from them,” Alaïa later reflected. “The clothes needed to stay precisely in place, but come off quickly.” Alaïa came to wider prominence at the beginning of the Eighties when a writer for French Elle, to whom he had loaned a leather skirt and a pair of studded gloves, featured them in the magazine. Nothing so overtly exotic, or erotic, had been seen in fashion for decades, and he was soon invited by the influential New York department store Bergdorf Goodman to show a collection there.
Terrified lest they discover that his entire “collection” consisted of fewer than
10 samples, he began to make impossible demands – first class air travel for his dog, among them – hoping that they would cancel. They did not: the show was a success, and he was launched. One of his early achievements was his championing of the model Naomi Campbell, whom he was the first to use for catwalk shows.
Alaïa’s cutting-edge styles, and his maverick business practices – he never advertised and deliveries from his atelier often arrived months late – meant that as early as the mid-eighties he was being written off by the fashion press. It did not help his cause over the years that he also fell out with Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue, and conducted lengthy feuds with, among others, rival designers Karl Lagerfeld and Hervé Leger, accusing the latter of copying his clothes. At all events, like most other houses, his business was gravely affected by the recession of the early Nineties. Hemlines dropped with the markets; overt sensuality was replaced by bleak androgyny, colour by black.
Alaïa responded by virtually turning his back on the fashion world. The truth was that he cared little for business. He professed to have little regard for money, an attitude which allowed him to work as he wanted, and he knew his own worth. For the next decade he reverted to designing for a few favoured clients.
He lived and worked in a large townhouse in the Marais quarter of Paris. Its basement was given over to his archive of clothes by the couturiers he admired – Vionnet, Balenciaga, Charles James – and to his collection of furniture. The ground floor was his showroom – a space on an almost imperial scale, lightly populated by monumental bronze clothes racks designed by his friend Julian Schnabel and an armchair made of recycled tyres. Behind this was a glass-ceilinged kitchen, where he gave daily lunches celebrated for the quality of the guests and the near-invariable menu of couscous. Above this was his own apartment, linked by a bridge to his atelier.
In 2001, however, the wheel began to turn once more. A small retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York led to a revival of his reputation as one of the great innovators of fashion, and he finally agreed to accept substantial investment from a larger brand, Prada. When Yves Saint Laurent retired, he hired many of the petits mains from his studio and in 2003 gave his first shows in more than 10 years. Though small in scale, they once again generated excitement and appreciative reviews. Once more, in the fickle world of fashion, he was The King.
Working with Prada saw him through a second impressive renaissance, and in 2007, he bought back his fashion business from the Prada group. The same year Compagnie Financière Richemont bought a majority stake in the business in a deal which allowed the designer to work at his own pace.
His later clients included Madonna and Lady Gaga; Victoria Beckham, who wore his work, a gift from her husband David, to two Academy Award parties in 2007; and the former first lady Michelle Obama, who became a regular Alaïa client, breaking with the tradition that American first ladies only wear the clothes of American designers to formal events. Azzedine Alaïa was a short man, standing perhaps 5ft tall, habitually dressed in silk or cotton Chinese pyjamas, of which he possessed more than 100 pairs. He was named Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in 2008.
He is survived by his partner, the painter Christoph von Weyhe. For many years he was inseparable from his Yorkshire terrier, Patapouf.
Azzedine Alaïa, born February 26 1935-40, died November 18 2017