Alaïa, the secrets of the spring-summer 1992 collection
How is a fashion collection born? There are as many answers to this question as there are designers and couturiers. But if you go to 18 rue de la Verrerie in Paris, until 6 January, you can discover how the spring-summer 1992 collection designed by Azzedine Alaïa came about. The exhibition, entitled ‘L’Alchimie secrète d’une collection’ (‘The secret alchemy of a collection’), gives a glimpse of how the collection owes its origins to the Marquise de Pompadour. – Isabelle Cerboneschi, Paris
Azzedine Alaïa had established his fiefdom in the Marais district of Paris, where he acquired a block of buildings to house his studio, his boutique, a place to live, exhibit and meet people, and later a hotel with a few rooms where he could entertain friends.
When he acquired this complex in 1987, including an industrial workshop that was once the hôtel des évêques de Bauvais, he discovered during the renovation that Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, who became the Marquise de Pompadour, the favourite of King Louis XV, had been educated here. Thanks to her education and her beauty, the young woman, who did not belong to the nobility, was able to enter the French Court and make her way to the King.
Madame de Pompadour fascinated Azzedine Alaïa: she represented the woman in all her power, capable of overcoming the obstacles of her origins to bend fate and rise to the pinnacle: the throne of France. The couturier saw this coincidence as a wink.
In 1991, he moved to rue de la Verrerie with his partner, the artist Christoph von Veyhe, and decided to create a collection inspired by the Marquise de Pompadour: the spring-summer 1992 collection. He was delighted to discover that La Pompadour had lived there,’ says Olivier Saillard, curator of the exhibition “The Secret Alchemy of a Collection”. That’s why he made this collection. He had done a lot of research. He felt under his patronage.
This is the most important collection ever created by the couturier: 115 passages. There are references to Versailles in the English embroidery along the hems, in the trompe l’oeil ribbons on the knitted dresses, but above all in the bustiers and corsets in perforated and lace leather.
For the first exhibition, we presented works that had already been exhibited, which was easier to do,’ explains Olivier Saillard. For the second exhibition, Carla Sozzani (President of the Azzedine Alaïa Association) suggested that we show pieces from the first collection presented here. As Azzedine’s reserves and collections are immense and plethoric, well-stocked but badly arranged, it was a miraculous catch’.
The dresses from the spring-summer 1992 collection are displayed on busts whose transparency gives full scope to the couturier’s expertise, to his art of cutting, which makes his clothes always seem lived-in. It’s impossible to date these clothes. This is true of all his work. Long before creators and designers drew inspiration from the past to reinvent the present, Azzedine Alaïa played the game of time travel. But with formidable subtlety and mastery: if you don’t know the origins of the collection, you won’t understand the references to La Pompadour.
On one wall of the exhibition is a video of the catwalk show, featuring the top models of the era, those who turned their first name into a brand name: Naomi (Campbell), Linda (Evangelista), Christy (Turlington), Cindy (Crawford), and others, beautiful to the power of ten, funny, playful. It was a period when they were having fun,’ recalls Olivier Saillard. They had bodies, curves, and they weren’t all the same’.
The exhibition reveals models that had not been shown since the fashion show, such as ‘all those little knitted dresses at the end, in very special colours, like crushed raspberries, that I’d never seen before,’ confides the exhibition curator. The colours have remained intact. Azzedine had a powerful feeling that he had a work to preserve, even if he did so in an unlikely order.’
L’Alchimie secrète d’une collection, 18 rue de la Verrerie, Paris. The exhibition runs until 6 January, and is open daily from 11:00 to 19:00.
