A week after world fashion month ended in Paris, the shy but staunch designer Azzedine Alaïa was in no hurry to show his collection. Alaïa is too modest a character to say it, but he has in his own way elevated the language of fashion.
His immediately identifiable clothes, though much copied, remain unlike anything else. He has been refining his chosen métier for more than half a century and is now universally respected both by the women who love to wear his designs and by others of his profession, which, it goes without saying, is extremely rare.
No two women look the same in his creations and that is important. He suspends his ego and the client is always put first.
Alaïa’s new collection for Spring/Summer 2017 will be no exception.
Alongside the requisite, impeccably engineered fit-and-flare knitwear for which he is most famous—it’s not for nothing that, since the 1980s, he has been referred to as the King of Cling—came black trapeze-line dresses in techno fabrics inset with geometric shapes in Tricolore (both French and Italian), an immaculate tailored black wool-crepe trouser suit, the perfect cashmere coat, and the most exquisite Swiss lace imaginable, in red, black and white and plum, all lined in Alaïa’s signature pink.
Fashion is arrogant, a reflection of our time—politically, economically. We have to try to understand why it is like that. We have to respect it even if it seems distorted. Today, time is so accelerated, and that’s not good for creation. —CONTRIBUTED
