When in November the news about Azzedine Alaïa's death spread on the Internet, tributes and homages immediately started pouring in from all over the fashion and fashionable world. The industry seemed genuinely grief-stricken and mourning one of the last couturiers.
A month has passed since then and the mourning news have been replaced by features about the future: the Maison announced that soon the Azzedine Alaïa Foundation will be launched in the fashion house's headquarters where Alaïa lived and worked.
This institution is a sort of new and improved version of the eponymous association founded in 2007 by the designer, his life partner, artist Christoph von Weyhe, and longtime friend Carla Sozzani, the Milanese retailer behind the 10 Corso Como stores.
The Foundation promises it will collaborate with cultural institutions to organise regular exhibitions on fashion history and design, it will also open up its library to researchers and establish grants to be awarded to young designers.
It was also recently announced that in January, during Haute Couture Fashion Week, an exhibition about Alaïa curated by Olivier Saillard - "Azzedine Alaïa: Je Suis Couturier" - will also launch in the house's headquarters in the Marais district, at the Galerie Alaïa, on Rue de la Verrerie. The event will feature around 35 pieces among them evening wear and designs that highlight Alaïa's skills as couturier.
The London-based Design Museum will instead host from May the exhibition "Azzedine Alaïa, the Couturier" directed by the museum's guest curator Mark Wilson, chief curator of the Groninger Museum (as you may remember from a previous post, Wilson worked on the 2011 exhibition dedicated to the Tunisian-born designer). The event, including over 60 couture pieces, will coincide with the house's first London store, opening at 139 New Bond Street around the same time of the year.
Last but not least, Alaïa's ready-to-wear and accessories collections will be presented in January and March 2018.
Blimey, you may think, Alaïa seems more present in the public realm now that he's dead than while he was alive. Yet this is often what happens when a fashion designer dies - the name lives on. We have seen this happening at Chanel, Dior, Lanvin, Moschino, Pucci, Versace and, in more recent years Alexander McQueen, just to mention a few ones. It is simply inconceivable for big fashion houses to stop producing collections, especially when there is a powerful group behind them or when a powerful group decides to relaunch them (at times with dubious results as it happened with Elsa Schiaparelli...), so that the life of a designer never ends, but turns into a legend and gets constantly reinvented.
From the financial point of view this is all perfectly understandable as a company owning a fashion brand must make sure it is profitable to keep it alive. That said, it is pretty sad to think that the original mind behind that particular house and its creations is not there anymore and quite often what comes after risks of turning into a series of copies or into gross misunderstandings of the founder's ethos.
In the case of Alaïa, while organising exhibitions (mind you, it will be incredibly difficult to recreate the natural perfection of the Galleria Borghese exhibition) and offering grants to students is all fine, showing a collection in such a short time since the last one (the latest show was a couture collection presented in July 2017, after a break of six years) seems a choice that goes against the principles in which the couturier believed in - showcasing a collection when he felt it was genuinely finished and not when the fashion calendar would tell him to present it.
Alaïa has a team of loyal collaborators (including studio director Caroline Fabre Bazin and the late couturier's first assistant, Hideki Seo) who have been working with him for decades and who will be developing his vision and carrying it into the future, but, with exhibitions and catwalk shows lined up, it seems that the house is focusing on profit rather than craftsmanship and that Alaïa the brand may be ready to join that same fashion circus that its founder rejected.
"My obsession has always been to make women beautiful. When you design with that idea in mind, nothing can go out of fashion," Alaïa once stated. Maybe those ones coming after Alaïa will be more interested in ensuring the Compagnie Financière Richemont-owned brand keeps on making money rather than simply making women beautiful.
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