Alber Elbaz, beloved fashion designer, dies of COVID-19 at age 59

Alber Elbaz, a Moroccan-born Israeli fashion designer who rejuvenated Lanvin and had recently launched a new venture, AZ Factory, died Saturday in Paris. He was 59.

The cause was COVID-19, Richemont, the company backing Elbaz’s brand, said.

Beloved not only by his celebrity clients like Meryl Streep and Natalie Portman but also by his peers, Elbaz was that rare character in fashion: a truly empathetic and generous designer, both in the clothes he made and in the way he conducted himself within the business. The graceful lines of his dresses mimicked the graceful lines of his life.

“Alber always thought of fashion as an embrace of life at its best,” said Anna Wintour, the global chief content officer for Condé Nast and editor of Vogue. “And when we wore his clothes, or were in his wonderful, joyful presence, we felt that, too.”

Designers like Pierpaolo Piccioli of Valentino and Stella McCartney all paid tribute to what Piccioli called one of fashion’s “biggest treasures.”

Elbaz had launched AZ Factory after a five-year hiatus following his abrupt firing from Lanvin, where he was fashion director from 2001 to 2015. During his time there, he turned Lanvin, the oldest surviving but dusty French fashion house, into a more modern and prominent brand whose creations were worn by the likes of Beyoncé, Lupita Nyong’o, Pharrell Williams, Michelle Obama and Harry Styles.

Elbaz was known for his self-deprecating humor and his insecurities. He had a fraught, public relationship with his weight and said that being skinny was a fantasy that influenced his work. He transformed that fantasy into lightness, he said, by turning his creations into comfortable and sometimes subtly eccentric clothes.

Portman once called him the “ultimate fashion philosopher-mentor.”

“He says things to me like: ‘Wear flats. You’re short. It’s much cooler not to pretend,’” Portman told Time magazine in 2007, when it named Elbaz one of the world’s 100 most influential people.

In recent years he had become something of a oneman advocate for reform of the fashion system and the pressures increasingly placed on designers.

As he said in 2015, as he received the Fashion Group International award, “We designers, we started as couturiers,” asking: ‘What do women want? What do women need? What can I do for a woman to make her life better and easier? How can I make a woman more beautiful?’”

Then, he said, “we became creative directors, so we have to create, but mostly direct.”

“And now,” he continued, “we have to become imagemakers, creating a buzz, making sure that it looks good in the pictures. The screen has to scream, baby. That’s the rule. Loudness is the new cool, and not only in fashion, you know. I prefer whispering.”

The world of intricate dresses, cat walks and red carpets was one that he embraced publicly but remained wary of.

“You have to go back to nothing in order to maintain the dream,” Elbaz told The New Yorker in 2009. “The moment the dream becomes reality and you start to mingle too much with all these people —” He left the comment unfinished.

Still, luxury clothes came with a price that he readily justified. He once compared a fashion collection to a vaccine — an easy product to duplicate, but not something cheap to create.

Albert Elbaz was born in Casablanca, Morocco, on June 12, 1961, and grew up in Israel. His mother, Alegria, was a painter, and his father, Meyer, a colorist in a hair salon. Though he dreamed of becoming a doctor as a child — he always called himself a terrible hypochondriac — fashion proved a better route to helping people.

After studying design at Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art in Tel Aviv in the mid-1980s and a brief stint in the Israeli army, he moved to New York, where he removed the T from his first name so that it would not be mispronounced, and because “Alber Elbaz,” he thought, made for a more balanced brand name.

His survivors include a brother and two sisters as well as his partner, Alex Koo.

In New York, Elbaz became the assistant designer of Geoffrey Beene. He then moved to Paris in 1996 to become the head of prêtà-porter design at Guy Laroche. Two years later, Yves Saint Laurent chose Elbaz to take over as his heir, designing the women’s Rive Gauche ready-to-wear collections for YSL.

That dream, however, was short-lived, as Gucci Group bought the brand in 1999 and Elbaz was soon fired in favor of Tom Ford. It was a crushing blow and started Elbaz on his journey questioning fashion.

In 2001, he met ShawLan Wang, a Taiwan-based, Chinese-born former media mogul who was part of a consortium that had purchased Lanvin, and persuaded her to “awake the sleeping beauty,” as he put it. Their partnership led to an aesthetic flowering as Elbaz experimented with dresses made from a single seam and clothes that managed to be both generous and elegant, straddling the line between classicism and modernism.

“Alber would always tell me, ‘I am just a dressmaker,’” said Wintour of Vogue. “He was, if by that we mean someone who had the enviable ability to make something women would love to wear — and an incredible instinct for how they would want to feel when they were wearing it.”

Elbaz received the International Award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2005 and was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2007. In 2016, the French government named him an Officier of the Légion d’Honneur.

Aside from a hit sneaker, however, Elbaz never quite managed to create the It bag that could power a brand forward in a world driven by accessories, and after repeated clashes with Wang over the future of Lanvin, he was fired, to the shock of the industry.

For the next five years Elbaz wandered the world, taking meetings in Silicon Valley and Switzerland, dipping in and out of collaborations with brands like Tod’s and Le Sportsac, and trying to decide what to do next.

His answer was a new brand, AZ Factory — which was backed by Richemont, the Swiss luxury company — based on the idea of making clothes to solve women’s problems, at a more accessible price, sold directly to them, without heed of season, size or dictat, using technology at the service of beauty.

“I asked myself, ‘If I was a woman, what would I want?’” Elbaz told The New York Times in January. “Something that is first comfortable. Something fun. Something that lets me eat a big piece of cake.”

That allowed him to create the most simple things he had ever made, he said — although he had also compared the formation of his new brand to giving birth.

“My hormones are burning,” Elbaz added. “I’m so itchy. I cry and laugh within seconds.” Still, he said, he was thrilled to be back.