Born: Tunis, Tunisia, 1940
Crowned the ‘King _of Cling’ in 1981, Azzedine Alaïa reinvented body consciousness at a time when the world was infatuated with frills. Alaïa’s underlying principle is that women should celebrate their undulations – one good reason why he returns to pliable textures, such as leather and rayon jersey, _time and time again.
Son of a wheat farmer, Alaïa studied art history and sculpture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Tunis, travelled to Paris at 18 years old and secured a succession of jobs, which included five days at Christian Dior and two seasons at Guy Laroche. For years Alaïa was one of the best-kept secrets in Paris, his phone number passed between the city’s grande dames. By the early 1980s, encouraged by Thierry Mugler and commissioned by Charles Jourdan, he launched his first collection. Alaïa was instrumental in promoting the supermodels – he met and employed Naomi Campbell as a 16-year-old model on her first day in Paris.
Although Alaïa’s style is essentially sexy – he has dressed Tina Turner, Grace Jones and Paloma Picasso – he also made a voluminous cloak for opera singer Jessye Norman for the French bicentenary parade, and a billowy cashmere coat and tailored trousers for Greta Garbo. Alaïa does not conform to seasonal timetables and his collections are always out of sync with everyone else. Fittingly, his book Alaïa, a compendium of amazonian images, took a decade to complete. ‘I’m not naive enough to think my dresses are going to be photographed unless the girl in them looks great,’ he told Vogue in 1990. ‘Anyway I feel depressed when I look at rails of limp dresses. I don’t feel they’re alive until they’re on a woman’s body.’
