Why London's new Alaia boutique will fire up your taste levels
The luxury strategy for cutting back on consumption is to blow most of your budget on one or two everlasting pieces thereby ensuring you can’t afford to buy anything else.
That’s the argument trotted out by Azzedine Alaïa junkies, and visiting his first ever store in London – the one with the spectacular staircase, an absolute must for Instagram traffic – the day before it officially opened this week, I can see a certain logic to it.
Many of the clothes on the rails look familiar. There’s the chiffon goddess dress Stephanie Seymour wore, the tailored coat Naomi Campbell has in every colour, the little cardigans and shirt dresses that everyone from Michelle Obama to Victoria Beckham collects.
Like Coco Chanel, Alaïa created his own vernacular: minimalist, a little sporty, albeit of the refined variety, always indifferent to ephemeral trends. If it works for you (you need to be bold, confident and have mastered the art of excellent posture I find) then it will always work.
Carla Sozzani, sister of the late Franca Sozzani, the legendary editor of Italian Vogue, and no style slouch herself (she founded the concept stores Corso Como, which now span the globe) first met Alaïa 40 years ago. “I was working for Italian Vogue. I had heard about this man doing made to measure for a small group of clients in Paris…” It was mutual adoration at first sight. He made her a black jersey dress. She still has it, but, no longer wears it. “It’s not so much that it has dated “ she says. “But I have. I don’t have the same shape.” She is minuscule but one doesn’t always want to wear body con Lycra in one’s 60s.
Alaïa was dubbed the King of Cling in the Eighties. However the tight, stretchy pieces were only one aspect. His tailoring is extraordinary: bonded, barely perceptible seams and darts that subtly reshape a woman’s body. He was the opposite of those designers who chuck on embellishment and gimmicks to create an effect – a radical innovator by subtle degrees.
Not everyone’s a fan. Karl Lagerfeld, in an interview this month with Numero magazine, took aim at just about every sacred cow on planet fashion and declared that “by the end of his career all he did was make ballet slippers for menopausal fashion victims”.
Sozzani smiles sweetly, rather as a Montessori teacher might when one of her pet pupils wets their cushion during show and tell. “I think to understand the root of that you’d have to go back to the Seventies and the rivalry between Azzedine and Karl when they were starting out”.
It seems rather menopausal-ist. It’s not as if Alaïa wasn’t continuously tweaking right up to his death in November. “There are 22,000 designs in the archives,” laughs Sozzani. “I don’t think we’ll have a problem finding ideas with which to fill this store”.
As someone who worked with Azzedine for four decades (she was fired from Italian Elle in the Eighties for putting an Alaïa dress on the cover of a key issue that was considered consecrated territory for Italian designers), Sozzani has become de facto curator of his legacy, involved in overseeing future collections, which will all be drawn from Alaïa’s library.
It’s ironic that his first UK boutique (and a forthcoming exhibition devoted to him at The Design Museum this May) come posthumously. The shop, like the clothes, is a work of art, with furniture and fittings designed by inter alia Marc Newson, Gio Ponti, Renzo Piano, and that staircase by Kris Ruhs.
Even if you walk away empty-handed your imagination and taste levels will be fired up…
