The Figure-Sculpting Fashions of Azzedine Alaïa

On the first night of spring in Paris, neither the unusually mild weather nor the miasmic atmosphere of the French presidential campaigns infiltrated the sealed erogenous universe of the Crazy Horse cabaret, on Avenue George V, where Azzedine Alaïa sat wedged between two senior members of his staff on a plush red banquette. Inspecting with practiced eyes the bare-bottomed girls prancing and wriggling onstage, the Alaïa team concluded that the engineering of the performers’ G-strings was imperfect. “We noticed they were shifting,” says Caroline Fabre-Bazin, the designer’s commercial director. “That did not happen when M. Alaïa fit them.”

For two years back in the late 70s—shortly before Azzedine Alaïa made his name by introducing into the fashion lexicon such present-day wardrobe staples as leggings, decorative metal studs, bodysuits, push-up bustiers, bandage dresses, and perforated leather—he designed costumes for Crazy Horse dancers. Says Fabre-Bazin, “From the Crazy Horse he learned the aesthetics of the entire body, and the importance of the fesse—the backside.”

After the show, over dinner nearby at Le Stresa, the designer explained some of the backstage secrets of the performers—how they apply foundation head to toe with “very large sponges” to perfect their flesh tones. Fabre interrupts for an instant to announce that she has just received an e-mail with the weekly sales report from the Alaïa boutique at Harrods, where he outperforms all other international brands. The numbers are up yet again. (Sixty dresses have sold there in a single day.) As Alaïa resumes the conversation, he is effusively greeted by another diner, the groom-to-be of a client who has commissioned from Alaïa two wedding dresses, awaiting final adjustments back at the Alaïa studio, in the Marais district. One gown is white, constructed from an ethereal new synthetic Japanese textile with a weave so microscopically fine it could have been spun by Arachne herself, the other a formfitting powdery knit sheath, for a second ceremony “at the beach.” It too is confected from a secret fiber, but was manufactured in Italy using Alaïa-instigated technology that incorporates the dress’s shapely three-dimensional blueprint right into the program of the knitting machinery. A true Alaïa woman knows that she needs Azzedine at every stage of her life, from courtship to marriage, to pregnancy, and well beyond; among his steadiest customers is fabled 50s haute couture mannequin Bettina Graziani, now 86. Alaïa is the one who first coaxed women out of loose maternity clothes, the better to show off “the most beautiful curve of all,” notes longtime client Mathilde de Rothschild. More than any designer today, Alaïa is an initiate into the intimate emotional, intellectual, and biological facts of being female. Says de Rothschild, “Thanks to his dresses a lady already has 50 percent of her work done for her, whether her aim is to do business or to seduce a man.”

The sales figures from Harrods and some 300 other global vendors bear out these airy theories. Without advertising, social media, licensing programs, e-commerce, markdowns, perfumes, P.R., or promotional initiatives of any kind, a department-store source confirms, Alaïa’s ready-to-wear clothes—retailing for up to $15,000 per garment—“sell like a drug. There is absolutely no price resistance.”

Born in Tunisia around 1940—dates are often hazy with the designer—Azzedine Alaïa was brought up in Tunis by his maternal grandmother and grandfather, a police officer. His grandfather’s best friend operated a cinema, and while the two older men played cards, Alaïa would sit rapturously through movies multiple times. He would then re-enact the films for his school friends, “singing, dancing, and performing the roles” in exchange for crayons. With the crayons, he would make drawings.

His art talent caught the attention of his mother’s friend Mme. Pineau, the midwife who had delivered him. Mme. Pineau conscripted Alaïa to assist her in her craft. “I helped deliver my first baby when I was 10! Mme. Pineau taught me how to cut the umbilical cord and tie it in a knot in order to make a beautiful belly button.” Less creaturely than childbirth for Alaïa were Mme. Pineau’s department-store catalogues, which got him dreaming of fashion, and her art books, which introduced him to Picasso. When he was about 15, Mme. Pineau registered Alaïa in the local school of fine arts, where he studied sculpture. To help pay for school supplies, he worked for a dressmaker with his sister, Hafida. From there, through his friend Leila Menchari, whose mother knew important Dior clients, Alaïa landed a position at the celebrated French couture house, on Avenue Montaigne, then at the peak of its glory. “But I only lasted five days there,” Alaïa says. As the Algerian War had just ended (it was the mid-1950s), his status as a Tunisian tainted him.

By about 1960, Alaïa was living in a maid’s room in the residence of the young Countess de Blegiers, where he remained for five years as the household’s live-in seamstress and “manny.” During this period, Alaïa adopted the habit of wearing laborers’ smocks, finally settling on the black cotton Chinese pajamas he wears exclusively to this day. Around the same moment, Simone Zehrfuss, wife of the architect Bernard Zehrfuss, also took Alaïa under her wing and introduced him to the chic intellectual set of Paris. Soon he became a pet of the hyper-elegant, distinguished writer Louise de Vilmorin (Earrings of Madame de … ), who referred to him as “my artist,” thanks to whom “I appear beautiful.”

In an era before ready-to-wear, when women relied on skilled, anonymous dressmakers for their wardrobes, Alaïa became the secret weapon to “appearing beautiful” for a growing clientele of artistic and aristocratic women. By the late 60s he had installed himself in a tiny two-room apartment-cum-atelier on Rue de Bellechasse, on the Left Bank, where a saleswoman from the recently closed house of Balenciaga helped him expand his client list, and Hafida, who lived with him, oversaw his business. Cécile de Rothschild brought Greta Garbo to Alaïa, and director René Clair made the introduction to Claudette Colbert. Through a hairdresser at the Alexandre salon, he became the dressmaker and friend of his idol, film siren Arletty, star of Les Enfants du Paradis. Says Mathilde de Rothschild, “I’m not sure why it took so many years before he became known to the fashion world. He was most interested in improving his technique. He didn’t care about money and fame.”

In 1979, Charles Jourdan, the trendy footwear designer, commissioned from Alaïa a small ready-to-wear line. This capsule collection was composed of garments in leather, ornamented only with metal hardware such as zippers, grommets, and buckles. Jourdan “rejected the collection because they found it too tough,” Alaïa recalls. Thinking otherwise, Rosine Baldaccini, wife of the sculptor César, brought Nicole Crassat, editor of French Elle, to Rue de Bellechasse. Crassat liked what she saw so much she put a grommeted black leather dress on the cover of her magazine, and began wearing the “tough” clothes herself. Soon a small tribe of adventuresome women swept onto the scene, swathed in what Joan Juliet Buck, another early adopter, called “highly sexualized versions of Darth Vader.”

Mathilde de Rothschild recalls, “I was living in New York in 1980 and was about to go back to Paris. Someone told me, ‘You must see this man who has re-discovered leather.’ I couldn’t imagine it! I got to Paris, rang at the door of Rue de Bellechasse, and Azzedine answered. With him was the painter Christophe von Weyhe, his boyfriend. I came back to New York with this stuff. Women stopped me on the street and asked, ‘Who is it?’ I was wearing something no one had seen before, caleçons—leggings.”

During Paris collection week in the summer of 1980, Alaïa lent to Nicole Crassat and her Elle colleagues Carlyne Cerf and Brigitte Langevin three outfits to wear to the shows. At a time when a baggy, Annie Hall–style androgynous look was the norm, Crassat made the rounds in a curvy leather suit with a nipped waistline, Cerf promenaded in a chiffon skirt weighted with grommets, and Langevin slinked about in a knit dress, around which spiraled, like Asclepius’s serpent, a single, long zipper. Bill Cunningham, then a journalist at Women’s Wear Daily, was transfixed by the sight of this novel species of female, reconfigured with an entirely new silhouette and attitude—broad shoulders, wasp waists, dark long legs. The “unknown designer,” Cunningham wrote in the copy that ran with his photos on November 23, 1981, was “putting women back in clothes designed to illuminate the curves of the female.” Alaïa recalls, “Bill wrote that he had seen the future. It is Bill who had the vision. I owe everything to him.”

Soon after the Cunningham photos appeared, Dawn Mello, then the fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman, tracked down Alaïa at Rue de Bellechasse. Says Mello, “He answered the door with a bag around his neck with a little dog in it. I asked him, ‘Can you do a collection? We’d like to introduce you to America.’ In September 1982 we had our show. He insisted on ironing the clothes himself! The entire press was there, and they loved it.” In less than two days, Bergdorf’s sold $50,000 worth of dresses, priced at around $700 each.

Maxfield, in Los Angeles, also snatched up the new sensation from Paris. Says Simon Doonan, who dressed the store’s windows in the early 80s, “Azzedine’s clothes were perfectly pitched for the moment—they were the glamorous version of punk. Everyone who was groovy started coming in for them, from Bette Midler to Cher. They were buying Alaïas as fast as we could hang them up.”

The Americans who embraced Alaïa most zealously, however, were the models, starting from his inaugural Paris show, in the tiny Rue de Bellechasse apartment, not long after the Bergdorf’s debut. Says architect Sophie Hicks, formerly of British Vogue, “That first show in Paris was running so late. There was chaos, mayhem in the corridors. Finally Janice Dickinson popped out and yelled, ‘Shut up—we’re starting!’ And this whole world of top models who you never saw outside of New York City started clip-clopping down the hall. We all looked at each other, wondering, How did Alaïa get this lot here? The girls all came over, we learned, to work not for money but for clothes. They wore them right off the runway into real life.”

In 1985, Bergdorf’s, which by now was generating $750,000 per season with the designer, began organizing an ambitious return engagement for Alaïa, an extravaganza to be staged by Alaïa’s frequent collaborator Jean-Paul Goude. But when Bergdorf’s wouldn’t underwrite Goude’s travel expenses, Alaïa says, the designer abruptly terminated his relationship with the store and switched loyalties to rival emporium Barneys. And to host the Goude-conceived spectacle, he turned to Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, who offered as a venue their post–Studio 54 club, the Palladium.

The pageant at the Palladium turned into a $300,000 A-list happening, featuring 52 models cascading, like Ziegfeld girls, down an impossibly steep staircase before an audience of 1,186, including Andy Warhol. Steve Rubell viewed the proceedings in broad cultural terms. “A club is about capturing the moment,” he commented, “and he is this moment in fashion.”

Alaïa’s moment stretched, as Cunningham predicted, into an epic decade-long phenomenon. His runway shows, relocated to the designer’s substantially expanded quarters on Rue du Parc-Royal, became the hottest ticket on the fashion circuit, and whomever Alaïa anointed as a mannequin became a superstar. Michael Gross, then covering fashion for The New York Times, recalls that “the shows were always a secret, never on the schedule set by the Chambre Syndicale, which he wouldn’t join. He got the coolest crowd in the world. You’d see Grace Jones, César next to Tina Turner. While prissy nose-in-the-air editors were at the Ritz eating lunch, the real news was happening at Alaïa.” Notes model and Alaïa muse Veronica Webb, “The girls fought over what pieces they got to wear. Everyone in the world would be in the audience—Chirac, Mitterrand, artists, rock stars. They knew they were about to witness something no one had ever seen before.”

Michael Gross remembers Simon Le Bon, watching his girlfriend, Yasmin, and her fellow catwalkers trying on the clothes that they would be taking home as payment. “They left the dressing-room doors wide open. So Simon Le Bon said, ‘Who cares about the front row? The best seat in the house is right here.’ ”

Alaïa’s Parc-Royal complex became a virtual supermodel incubator, and for several of the fledgling cover girls he discovered, it became their home. Stephanie Seymour, who still refers to Alaïa as “Papa,” arrived at his doorstep when she was 14. Naomi Campbell was 16 when she entered Alaïa’s atelier, where she lived for three years. “She was a baby!,” Alaïa says. “I took care of her. I saw in her a new Josephine Baker.”

“Did he start my career?,” Veronica Webb asks rhetorically. “Are you kidding? Myself, Naomi, Stephanie—he taught us how to use our forks, how to walk, how to take rejection, how to present ourselves. He treated us all like flesh-and-blood children.”

To some observers, the Alaïa juggernaut was spinning out of control. When Alaïa won two French fashion “Oscars” in 1985, surrounded by a bevy of supermodels in his mummy-inspired bandage dress (Grace Jones wore a version in A View to a Kill that same year), the Los Angeles Times poked fun at the way the shy, tiny Tunisian “literally had to be dragged on stage to accept his awards” by the gaggle of glamazons. Feminists disapproved of his reviving such fetish-y retro contraptions as the heavily padded underwire bra, which pushed the breasts into exaggerated cleavage, and which paved the way for the Wonderbra mania of the next decade.

On October 17, 1986, Women’s Wear Daily ambushed the designer with a front-page story titled “The Rise and Fall of Azzedine Alaïa,” an attempt to precipitate a collapse that had not in fact occurred. The feature vilified Alaïa as “impossible, crazy, and demanding.” Tina Turner and Grace Jones, the paper proposed, “may still clutch him to their navels, but fashion has moved away from the body, and, it seems, away from Alaïa.” The buttock-cupping clinginess of his clothes, WWD claimed, had earned him the cruel nickname of “Ass-inine.” Alaïa believed that the cause of the excoriation was his denying WWD a preview of his collection. But John Fairchild, former editor of Women’s Wear, remembers differently. “The iron curtain came down,” Fairchild states, “and he stopped inviting us to his shows. In the savage world of fashion, he really stands out. He understands women, understands their bodies, and isn’t that half the point of it all?”

Though the stake was driven through his heart, and Women’s Wear ceased covering him for the interim, the cult of Alaïa did not die. To help meet the seemingly insatiable demand for Alaïa’s clothes, in 1988 client Jacqueline Schnabel opened a pioneering gallery-style Azzedine Alaïa boutique in SoHo, at 131 Mercer Street, with an interior designed by her husband, Julian, whose work Alaïa—a quietly voracious art patron—collected. With its crusty cast-bronze rolling racks, topped with anthropomorphic finials, salvaged-oak floors, and raw plaster-cast vitrines, Jacqueline Schnabel’s primitive-chic store became a mecca not only for fashion connoisseurs but also for art students. Back in France, President Mitterrand offered Alaïa the Legion of Honor, but the designer declined it. “Three times I have refused,” he recounts. “From Mitterrand, from Chirac, and from Sarkozy. Why? Because the most beautiful decoration for me is when women are wearing my clothes.”

In the 90s, Paris ceded a measure of its fashion prestige to Italy. Prada vaulted into the limelight, and Gianfranco Ferré was crowned creative director of Christian Dior, a position that Alaïa had rejected. “I prefer to stay poor,” he demurred. Recalls Pamela Golbin, chief curator of Paris’s Musée de la Mode, “Haute couture was not doing well at all. The Iraq war was on. There was a recession. It was a time of grunge, minimalism.” After a decade of invincibility, Alaïa appeared finally to be a casualty of changing tastes and times. The Azzedine Alaïa boutique on Mercer Street closed in 1992, hurt not so much by the economy and the fickleness of fashion but by Alaïa’s erratic store deliveries and show schedules. (He ceased staging presentations altogether in 1991.)

Says Simon Doonan, “Gene Pressman and I went to see him, at some point in the 90s, and it was the same dress on the same form, the same record playing—time had stopped.” But the real reason Alaïa had (as Cathy Horyn wrote in The New York Times) “managed his own oblivion” is that his sister, Hafida, with whom he had continued to live and work, died in 1992. “It was a horrible period,” Veronica Webb remembers. “Hafida and he had been so close, I used to think they were twins. She got breast cancer and it ate her like that.”

Alaïa says, “I was working so hard I didn’t have enough time to see her at the hospital. Afterwards, I learned that work shouldn’t come first. It’s why the fashion calendar bothers me—editors have no time for their families. I didn’t care about losing my house. I cared about losing my sister. It’s stupid to be so crazy about clothes.”

In the depths of his slump, his friend the Italian fashion entrepreneur Carla Sozzani (whom he now calls “sister”) stood by Alaïa, gradually coaxing him back to work. “I could not let that talent go to waste,” she says. “I did whatever I could.”

By 2000, Alaïa bounced back with a runway presentation, the largest in years, and that September he unveiled a retrospective at the Guggenheim SoHo. And in a twist that WWD termed “stunning,” Alaïa sold a 100 percent financial stake in his company to Prada. As part of their business agreement, overseen by Sozzani, the designer and the Italian firm formed an Alaïa Foundation to preserve both the master’s personal archives and his world-class vintage couture collection. “His business,” prophesied WWD, which was once again admitted to Alaïa’s shows, “is in the throes of a major renaissance.” As part of this ongoing “renaissance” the designer completed renovations on his present-day headquarters, a converted 750,000-square-foot factory and warehouse at 7 Rue de Moussy, in the Marais district, which in its finished state now comprises a boutique, ateliers, a cathedral-like iron-and-glass showroom, a hotel, and, surmounting it all, a vast, monkish private apartment, with views overlooking the Right Bank.

In 2005, Alaïa returned to New York to accept an award from Fashion Group International. To mark the occasion, Barneys orchestrated celebratory windows inside of which Doonan and his crew spelled out Alaïa’s name in loaves of French bread from Payard. Overnight, an unintentional kinetic element infiltrated the display. “Mice had entered, and they were gnawing at the bread!,” Doonan remembers. “But Azzedine is so fabulously unpretentious—he just thought it was so funny.”

If anyone was hoping to find a metaphor of decay in the nibbling interlopers, they were gravely disappointed. In another startling financial maneuver, in 2007, Alaïa bought back 100 percent of his company. Then, just a few months after that transaction, Alaïa, again guided by Carla Sozzani, sold 100 percent of his company to the Swiss Richemont group (owners of Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels), the second-largest luxury conglomerate in the world.

Says Alaïa, regarding the Richemont arrangement, which allows him complete creative control, “Richemont is a good group. They would only put their nose in my business if I didn’t work—and that will never happen.”

During the golden age of haute couture one abiding fashion cliché was that any taxi driver in Paris knew by heart the address of Christian Dior. Reversing this old formula, it is today virtually impossible to find a Paris taxi driver who knows the whereabouts of the Alaïa boutique. There are no storefront windows tempting passersby with seductive branded wares at 7 Rue de Moussy—the sole freestanding Alaïa boutique on the planet—only a tall, unarticulated façade on which, if one looks up carefully, the capital letters of the designer’s last name can be discerned, incised in stone. Inside the store, the coveted garments—dresses arranged according to earthy palettes of petroleum blue, bordeaux, peach, white, steel—hang on the Schnabel racks salvaged from the shuttered Mercer Street store, and a man or two sits on Mark Newsom–designed molded-plastic chairs, awaiting the exits of wives or girlfriends from the cavernous brick, rippled-glass, and wood cabine, or dressing room.

Following the rule of communality by which Alaïa lives, shoppers change together in one common space, adorned with Schnabel portraits (one of Stephanie Seymour, another of Alaïa) and a Tatiana Trouvé sculpture. On this warm afternoon several Americans animate the cabine, along with Alaïa stalwart Mathilde de Rothschild. One New Yorker, who ordered from the Alaïa couture line a black flounced gown, is in town for a final fitting. “Why Alaïa?” she asks, her sharpened and elongated outline reflected in a giant gilt-edged mirror. “Every time I wear Alaïa my husband has a big smile on his face!” De Rothschild concurs. “No husband has ever told his wife to change out of an Alaïa.” More females stream into the shop and out of the cabine to gather further armloads of flattering confections. To their amazement, Alaïa himself suddenly materializes in his shop, having descended from his workrooms, two flights up. He is smiling at the transforming effect his clothes are having on this garland of women, whom he begins to assist. Often customers will inquire during these unannounced appearances, “Is he the real Alaïa?” Due to their complex craftsmanship, which takes the designer sleepless months and sometimes years to develop—first in solitude and then in constant in-person consultation with factories in France and Italy—without stays, corsetry, underpinnings, and most remarkably of all, in the case of some knits, seams, Alaïa’s dresses famously lift and firm backsides and breasts, and extend and tighten torsos.

Behind the shop, at an overscaled glass-and-metal kitchen table, a group settles into white Eileen Gray chairs for a family-style lunch of stuffed eggplant, cucumber salad, and roast beef; Alaïa shops for meat himself, from Gardil, the best butcher in Paris. The napkins are paper, the cutlery stainless steel. Though Rosa, the Algerian housekeeper, is on duty, Alaïa himself will serve his guests, some of them his employees. Today the couturier is also sharing his table with the art dealer Jocelyn Wolff, whose gallery, in the edgy 20th Arrondissement, Alaïa will briefly visit after the meal. Alaïa’s Saint Bernard, Didine, snores loudly from his dog bed in the corner. Alaïa is animatedly discussing the esoteric Franz Walther conceptual pieces he is considering acquiring, and the baby white owl he is adopting as a pet. (“Maybe I’ll call her ‘Callas’!”) Alaïa is already zookeeper to a menagerie of seven cats and one smaller dog, a gift from Shakira. Pop stars have always gravitated to the couturier. Alicia Keys will wear one of his dresses on the cover of her next album, and Lady Gaga sang in an Alaïa design during her 2011 ABC Thanksgiving special. His most conspicuous customer, though, is Michelle Obama (she buys through Ikram in Chicago), whom he reveres so much he almost blushes at the mention of her name. As far as Hollywood is concerned (Penélope Cruz and Bérénice Bejo are notable clients), “if a movie star doesn’t want to come here for a fitting,” Alaïa says, “she won’t get my dress. I want to speak directly with a star, not her stylist. If they don’t need me, I don’t need them.”

Following the gallery visit, Alaïa ascends to the third floor in an elevator and passes through his warren of workrooms—one for gowns (flou), where the wedding dress in the secret Japanese synthetic awaits, others for leather and for tailoring. The epicenter of the Alaïa operation, however, is one story below, where Alaïa’s humble wooden worktable is situated. On the table’s surface are placed, seemingly haphazardly, two steel rulers of different lengths, a French-curve ruler, and a transparent plastic Vary-Form ruler—the humble protractor-like instruments of the pattern-maker’s profession. There is also tailor’s chalk, a pair of scissors, and a horseshoe magnet, to collect scattered pins, the most essential of his elementary tools. Above the table is a bulletin board displaying pictures—of Arletty, the Egyptian vocalist Umm Kulthum, Bettina Graziani, and his baby owl—and also a large flat-screen television, which typically during the day is off. But late at night, when he is alone in his studio—Alaïa generally works until about four in the morning and then arises again at seven—he plays animal or travel documentaries on it. “Because I travel only in my chair,” he explains.

Perhaps the most intimate experience anyone might have with Alaïa is to observe his hands at work. The hands have been shaped by his métier—by pinching fabric, by pushing in pins, by endless small, sure fluttering and flowing movements, similar to the gestures of a sculptor modeling clay. His hands are flexible, but calloused. Once not long ago a worker accidentally slammed a door on his right hand, leaving it swollen and bruised. Yet, like a ballerina who continues to perform with injured feet, he still pinned and pinched, stroked and smoothed, until an intern from Kuwait, Fajer Al-Rajaan, intervened and asked her father to fly in a doctor.

Alaïa’s fit model, a sultry Brazilian named Ana Carolina, sits on a stool beside the worktable. She is dressed in Alaïa’s trademark black leggings and bodysuit, which snaps at the crotch. Alaïa places on her a leather-collared petroleum-blue wool swing jacket whose armhole and slope he wishes to refine. He will fit and refit an evolving article of clothing many dozens of times, obsessively taking it apart like a puzzle and re-assembling it, perfecting it millimeter by millimeter. He is probably the only brand-name designer left who still cuts his patterns himself. “That is his strength,” says designer Sophie Theallet, Alaïa’s former assistant of 10 years.

Alaïa removes the jacket from Ana Carolina’s shoulders and lays it out again in jigsaw pieces on his worktable. Once the voluminous coat is disassembled and spread flat, it is apparent that its body forms a perfect circle, and its armhole a flawless oval. The coat has only one seam, down the center of its back, and the fabric is marked with a network of temporary stitches in white, red, yellow, and green, curved contours that make the dark cloth resemble a map of the globe. The white stitches indicate the grain of the fabric, while the colored ones delineate successive stages of the fittings.

Part geometer, part alchemist, Alaïa endeavors to tame material into behaving in a manner alien to its intrinsic nature: chiffon takes on heft, knits assume structure, leather softens to a fluid. He carries a piece of the mutating petroleum-blue coat to an ironing board, where he steams some recalcitrant bit of fabric into submission. “Ça, c’est là!” he announces, smiling, and then returns to the table. He cannot explain his technique or the morphing three-dimensional volumes he sees in his head. “I am autodidact!” he protests. “His hands,” Pamela Golbin suggests, “have their own brains.”

Dinner is the one at-home meal the designer cooks, at his massive stove, tonight with Rosa’s assistance. He pan-fries calamari and argues with Rosa. “I can’t stand cooking with Arabs!” he complains to her. “So what are you, Swedish?,” Rosa snaps back. He also has prepared a dozen artichokes, each daintily tied with string, and red and green hot peppers, roasted Tunisian-style. He learned to cook from his mother and grandmother, from whom he also acquired the habit of setting extra places at the table, in case friends drop in. Christophe, his partner of perhaps 50 years by now, has gone home to Hamburg, but the table is filled with Caroline Fabre-Bazin and Alaïa’s assistant Hédi El Chikh, who dine with him every night; Alison Sachs, from Richemont; and Fajer. Alaïa brings platters to the table, ladles out generous servings, and takes his seat at the table’s head. He has a glass of vodka with dinner, and he grows expansive.

“I never take a bow after a show,” Alaïa says. “I don’t want to be a clown. To get applause just for myself is too disrespectful to the many people helping me. The present fashion system is too hard—there are too many collections. The designers have no time to think! Money is too important. Schedules are too crazy. There is something fake—there are too many designers at each house. When I design, I am always starting at the beginning. I consider that I know nothing. I have more problems making a pencil skirt now than I did two years ago! I am never sure that anything’s good enough. Something that is good today will not be good tomorrow.”

Dinner finishes around 12:30 a.m. The guests disperse, but Alaïa, having walked them outdoors to their cars, re-enters 7 Rue de Moussy, to head back to the second floor—to his pins, tailor’s chalk, rulers, iron, and nature documentaries. “At night,” says Sophie Theallet, “is when the magic happens.” Reflects Carla Sozzani, who is currently helping the designer organize a career retrospective to open at Paris’s Galliera museum in September 2013, “Azzedine represents fashion at its purest. In his clothes, women feel beautiful, comfortable, admired. What more could we want?”