Simply find the best possible online shopping ALAIA deals
Shop ALAIA products and compare prices and listings on popular online marketplaces.
josh olins
After spending the day with Alaïa and Campbell on the Vogue shoot, my interview with Azzedine – the last he ever gave – continued by email. And I got the feeling from his longtime right-hand, Caroline Fabre Bazin, that this was probably the best way to communicate. Something he definitely shared with Naomi – a reluctance to be pinned down to a specific timetable. Alaïa famously showed his collections when he felt they were ready. For decades, his acolytes – clients, press, store buyers – would come to Paris specifically for him, with no guarantee that he would actually put anything on the catwalk. So there would be seasons when he would, for instance, recut old styles for Barneys, his biggest American outlet. No one complained. Likewise, about the six years between his most recent couture show, last July, and the previous one or the eight years back to the one before that.
Read more: Azzedine Alaïa In Vogue
So what was the sway he held over fashion? The elusiveness was definitely fundamental, because it gave credit to such honourable human qualities as loyalty, intelligence, appreciation, self-awareness. For the women he dressed, Alaïa wasn’t about right here, right…
Alaïa may have become a byword for a certain kind of glamorous silhouette, but that’s only one very sliver of the house’s vast repertoire. For fall, the Maison Alaïa studio focused on daywear, a direction reinforced by the profusion of flat footwear styles on offer, from slides and loafers to lace-up boots and knit sneakers.
As ever, the back and forth between the Editions reissues and the main line highlighted the elements put into the spotlight this season. Here, it was zippers — famously captured by Arthur Elgort in a 1987 photograph of Monsieur Alaïa adjusting an early incarnation around Naomi Campbell — the inlaid “charnière” (hinge, in French) leather lacing used both to assemble and adorn pieces, and mainstays such as crinoline shapes, corsetry, goddess dresses and basques.
Other returning winners included the shearlings — a perfecto-style version from 1987 and its fringed counterpart from winter 2005 featuring geometric “charnière” edges — and a trio of striking double-breasted coats.
But as steeped as it is in the techniques developed by the late couturier, there was little nostalgia in the lineup, filled as it was with flared skirts with laser-cut openwork, lush knitwear, crisp poplin shirts and leather galore. New…