Fondation Azzedine Alaïa

Category: Art & Architecture

Location: Paris, France

”My obsession is to make women beautiful. When you create with that in mind, things can’t go out of fashion.” 

Azzedine Alaïa never trained to work in fashion – he was educated as a sculptor at the Tunis Institute of Fine Arts. 

This is also what came to separate him from other designers of his generation; he viewed the relationship between garments and the body as sculpting a body through fashion, rather than merely dressing someone in clothes.

To learn about construction, he would deconstruct garments designed by Madeleine Vionnet and Cristóbal Balenciaga. 

Alaïa studied the clothes, and then put them back together, in this way learning the process of creating a garment from the inside and out. 

Alaïa was not born into the industry; his parents were wheat farmers in Tunisia. 

In 1957, he moved to Paris, but had to leave after only a few days, as the Algerian war broke out. After the war had ended, he returned, and worked for first Guy Laroche and then Thierry Mugler before opening his atelier – in his own apartment – in the late 1970s. 

A few years later, in 1980, he moved to larger premises on rue du Parc-Royal, privately dressing the world’s most famous women – including Greta Garbo, Marie-Hélène de Rothschild and Louise de Vilmorin – who would come here for their fittings. 

At the same time as he changed addresses, he began creating prêt-à-porter-collections, and soon Alaïa was internationally known. 

A famous anecdote is that André Putnam, who was a fan of his, was one day stopped on the street in New York while wearing an Alaïa leather coat. 

The person who had stopped her was a buyer at Bergdorf Goodman, who wanted to know who had made the garment. Soon, Alaïa’s garments were sold at the department stores in both New York and Beverly Hills. 

Even when Alaïa was at the height of his fame, he preferred to keep his shows intimate and small, and refused to conform to the schedule of the fashion calendar. 

If he needed to rest and take time off, he simply would not produce a new collection, and refuse to put on a fashion show. 

In this way, and even though he was a fashion insider, he was also rebellious and critical of the mainstream fashion system and its tendency to promote newness over quality. 

Design-wise, his garments were known for their tight fit, deft tailoring, curve-accenting seeming, leather work, and inventive use of knits. 

The colours he favoured tended to be the sombre, mostly neutrals and earth-tones. 

In an interview in Crowd Magazine, Catherine Lardeur, former editor-in-chief of French Marie Claire, stated: 

“Fashion is dead. Designers do not create anything; they only make clothes so people and the press would talk about them. The real money for designers lies within perfumes and handbags. It is all about image. Alaïa remains the king. He is smart enough to not only care about having people talk about him. He only holds fashion shows when he has something to show, on his own time frame. Even when Prada owned him, he remained free and did what he wanted to do.” 

In 2017, Alaïa passed away. 

Ten years prior, he had begun planning for the foundation, preserving his work by founding the Association Azzedine Alaïa, later turned into Fondation Azzedine Alaïa. 

The foundation is housed in a group of buildings set around an interior courtyard, landscaped with plants. 

There is a large exhibition gallery with a permanent display of Alaïa’s designs, and on the first floor, a second exhibition gallery. 

There is also a bookshop and a café.