The king is dead; long live the king. Azzedine Alaïa’s heart failed last November, but his presence will be more keenly felt in Britain this year than ever before. A major exhibition opens at the Design Museum in May, with his first London boutique coming to New Bond Street before that. After the outpouring of emotion on his death – from Naomi Campbell, who lived with him as a teenage model and always called him Papa; from the Parisian great-and-good who ate couscous at his table; from the clients who worshipped how he made them look – 2018 will be the year when Alaïa is recognised not just as the man who changed what models wore, but as the man who changed what we all wore.
“For me, fashion is the body,” Alaïa said in 1982. The rest of us took a little while to catch up, but we certainly got there in the end. Since the mid-80s, the skin and curve and flesh and muscle of women’s bodies have been the beating heart of how we want to look, with the role of fabric being to enhance that. That was how Alaïa saw it from the start. “I make clothes, women make fashion,” he would say, or: “I am not a designer, I am a couturier.” What he was saying, every time, was that it was the body that mattered most.
When I say the body, I mean sex, of course. People can get very pious, in a well-meaning way, talking about designers who have died. There have been many righteous eulogies about Alaïa staying up all night perfecting a sleeve, breathless tales of weddings delayed while he stitched the bridesmaids into their dresses, morality lectures about how close he came to giving up on his light-as-air honeycomb knit before he mastered the technique. All of which is laudable and historically significant but slightly misses the point, which is that Alaïa put modern erotica into fashion.
There is nothing new about clothes that mould a body into an hourglass – the earliest known corsets are the stiffened belts built to reduce waist size depicted on Minoan pottery in around 1500BC – yet Alaïa was revolutionary in the way he looked at women’s figures. Where corsetry created a static, airless ideal of a womanly shape, Alaïa worked with seams, stretch and drape to create a sex appeal that was raw and muscular. His bodies were shaped with muscles and with seams, not with whalebone and horsehair padding.
