It was in Paris that Azzedine Alaïa found fame and, eventually, fortune, but the couturier drew constant inspiration from Africa—the continent of his birth.
“He never claimed it deeply, but it’s even more extensive and unexpected than even I thought,” said curator Olivier Saillard during a preview of “Azzedine Alaïa et L’Afrique,” which opened at the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa this afternoon. For the next week or so, it will overlap with a trio of Africa-themed exhibitions—including one on contemporary African fashion—at the Musée du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac, on the Left Bank.
“There were the materials—the raffia, the embroidery, the palette—but there was also a fascination with Africa’s cultures, its beauties, that permeates his work. There’s a similar economy of line,” the curator noted.
Three summer collections, from 1988, 1989, and 1990, naturally created a throughline that Saillard said he’d long wanted to explore. But, like unraveling a knit, the more he unspooled, the more influences emerged across Alaïa’s decades-long oeuvre. The archives even yielded pieces—a jacket embellished with cowrie shells, from 1987, among them—and a hoard of ethnographic masks that no one knew existed.
More partial to nature documentaries than actually discovering new lands, Alaïa traveled to Kenya once, for a photo shoot with Peter Beard.
“He was overwhelmed by the Maasai culture,” Saillard recalled. “He once recounted how Maasai men spend time looking to the sky. ‘What could be more beautiful, more noble than that?’ he would say. I think that says a lot about what Africa was for him: a state of mind, a presence, a way of contemplating time.”
Familiar themes of light and shadow, rendered in lace, macramé and laser-perforated cotton, evoke mashrabiya, the carved, latticed screens of Alaïa’s native Tunis. “He used to say that if he could have bottled a scent it would be fresh like the water thrown on whitewashed walls to cool the courtyards,” the curator noted. From the spring-summer 1992 collection comes women’s wear iterations of the long, striped shirts typically worn by men in North Africa, as well as a cropped mesh hoodie and skirt worn on the runway by Naomi Campbell.
A number of icons stand among the 62 looks displayed here, such as the black crocodile tail coat, the “Peter Beard” leopard knits. Less well-known are the raffia ensembles from spring-summer 2015 and 2016. From the 1990 couture comes a dress in macraméd twine embellished with tiny, pointed shells, and from the ready-to-wear a sculptural bralette and matching skirt swinging with cowries. And though the fringed looks from 1988—whether in python, humble cord, or the cascades of gold beads worn onstage by Tina Turner—are high on drama, they were never intended as costume, Saillard noted.
In particular, gold looks offer a couture homage to Alaïa’s personal pantheon, starting with Cleopatra. A couture a bronze knit bandage dress stands in counterpoint to a long, sculpted gown from the 2010 haute couture collection, and a lacy knitted evening coat from 1992.
Elsewhere, shades of olive, brick, and orange; exotic skins; and leopard prints—newly brought back into the conversation thanks to the Congo national football team—are intended to remind viewers that Alaïa was a formidable colorist.
“For Alaïa, it was never about iconography, it was always about the texture and color,” offered Saillard. “He chose warm, muted, deliberately unflashy palettes because they age better. But more than that, he believed it was color that sculpts.”