The Great Fashion Designers

by Brenda Polan

  Paul Brierley Smith was born in Beeston, Nottingham, in 1946. He left school without qualifications at the age of fifteen, whereupon his father, Harold, instructed him to work in a clothing warehouse, where he was little more than a gofer. It was the early 1960s, when fashion was on the verge of a youth-led explosion. Smith began putting together displays in the warehouse and creating his own fashion shoots. His ambition at this point was to become a professional cyclist, but a major accident at the age of seventeen changed all that. Smith spent six months in hospital and emerged with a different outlook on life. He started hanging out with art students in pubs and ingesting the art and fashion of the time. For a few years, he energetically embraced the late 1960s counterculture, dressing the part to the disgust of one elderly man who stopped him in the street to admonish him: ‘I fought in the war for you and you dress like a bloody girl.’ He joined forces with a student womenswear designer named Janet, taking charge of the menswear department of her shop in 1966 and learning the rudiments of retail. Smith opened his first shop, Vetement, in 1970, selling such designers as Kenzo and Margaret Howell and initially a few locally made shirts and jackets. The shop evolved at a slow pace, developing steadily, if unspectacularly, throughout the decade. Smith’s personal style had shifted towards a more dressed-up look, including bespoke suits, cashmere sweaters and made-to-measure boots with Cuban heels.

  The Paul Smith label was not formally launched until 1976 in Paris. New lightweight fabrics were expanding the options for men’s tailoring. Giorgio Armani was making softer suits in Italy. Smith took some of these lessons but did not push them nearly as far, preferring to make his impact by playing with suits in different ways. A pinstripe suit was paired with a navy blue spot shirt and white plimsolls. A Prince of Wales check or a chalkstripe might turn up in unconventional colourways, with brightly coloured linings. From the beginning, he had support in his experiments from his lifelong partner Pauline Denyer (they married in 2001), who studied at the Royal College of Art and therefore had a technical training that Smith had never enjoyed. She designed the early collections, he later admitted. In their early twenties, they visited the couture shows in Paris, attending Chanel, Cardin, Balmain and Yves Saint Laurent. Smith’s approach to design was more in line with this tradition than the unconstructed shapes that swept through fashion in the early 1980s, inspired by Japanese designers such as Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto. ‘At that time, a lot of our art colleges lost the ability to create clothes in a traditional way,’ recalled Smith. ‘A lot of exciting things were happening, of course … but I really wish that this foundation had continued. Unconstructed suits hurt my eyes.’

  Smith’s influence extended far beyond his own label. For many years, he was discreetly working as a menswear consultant for Marks & Spencer, Britain’s biggest clothing retailer, ploughing the money he earned back into his own business. Likewise, a thriving wholesale business enabled him to maintain momentum whenever his own shops were quiet. A key move was the freehold purchase and opening of a shop at 44 Floral Street in London’s Covent Garden in 1979. It was the first fashion store to open on the street. He bought the unit next door shortly afterwards and resolved to keep its old wooden-panelled fittings, developing the Paul Smith retail style, an eccentric mix of old and new. The shop evolved to become one of the most important stores in modern British fashion history, a place of pilgrimage for modern menswear enthusiasts, not least for its artistic and witty shop windows. Smith’s retail experience, learned the hard way, was invaluable as he developed his business. ‘You have to be 90 per cent businessman and 10 per cent designer,’ he said.

  The 1980s were a golden decade for Smith. While the made-to-measure tailors of Savile Row struggled to survive, British tailoring was assured of a place on the modern map of fashion thanks to Smith, with a number of smaller designers, such as Richard James, also developing in his wake. The Paul Smith label caught the wave of a newly prosperous Britain. Every go-ahead young creative type in 1980s London had a Paul Smith suit, along with a pair of boxer shorts and a Filofax personal organiser, which were both sold and promoted by Smith. Well ahead of many European designers, Smith spotted the golden potential of Japan, signing a license with C. Itoh in 1984 and travelling back and forth twice a year ever since. This commitment reaped rewards and prompted other designers to follow his lead. Regular tenjikai (exhibitions of new collections) are staged in Tokyo, where Smith has a celebrity status of extraordinary dimensions. He was more cautious about the emergence of China as an important new market in the early years of the twenty-first century, opening a first store in Shanghai in 2004.

  Elsewhere, the retail development of Paul Smith continued apace, with a first store opened in New York on Fifth Avenue in 1987, a store in Paris in 1993, and a new London shop on Sloane Avenue in 1997. Perhaps his most unusual shop was West-bourne House, a large Victorian residence in Notting Hill, redesigned by Sophie Hicks. In six rooms over three floors, the complete Paul Smith collection was sold, together with a bespoke tailoring service. Smith’s womenswear, launched in 1994 and produced in Italy, has had a lesser impact than his menswear, drawing on his menswear collection for much of its inspiration and look. Smith has often stood aside from the mainstream of the designer industry in Britain, avoiding the British Fashion Awards, which he once criticised as ‘self-congratulatory’. He became frustrated with the failure of British industry to produce the management to nurture new designers although he worked hard behind the scenes in an advisory capacity to try and drum up some momentum. The designer also spoke out regularly against the uniformity of modern fashion designers. In speeches around the world, he argued the case for a new spirit of individuality in fashion—a viewpoint that had became widely accepted by the late noughties. A great shop, he said, should be like an Aladdin’s cave ‘where you’ll see something hideous next to something wonderful, something low-priced next to something high-priced.’

  Smith also ardently believes everyone can have a go at design. In that sense, he may point the way forward for the future of design, with a do-it-yourself mood sweeping through modern popular culture, supported by new technological advances. Perhaps the twenty-first century will see the end of the concept of an omnipotent designer, replaced by a more collaborative process in which the end consumer has a significant say. As an outspoken individualist, Smith also represents a note of hope for fashion during a period of globalisation. Now in his sixties, Smith continues to work at a ferocious pace. His design philosophy is best summed up in the title of a book he authored in 2001: You Can Find Inspiration in Everything (and If You Can’t, Look Again). Smith himself is reluctant to over-philosophise about his contribution to fashion. ‘I ended up designing clothes that I wanted to wear myself and felt good in,’ he said. ‘Well made, good quality, simple cut, interesting fabrics, easy-to-wear. No-bullshit clothing.’

  Further reading: Paul Smith effectively explored his approach to design in You Can Find Inspiration in Everything (and If You Can’t, Look Again) (2001).

  39 AZZEDINE ALAIA (c. 1940–)

  Life for fashion editors trying to pin down a handful of consistent trends to guide their readers got pretty tough in the early 1980s. The round of catwalk shows felt like chaos, but it was possible to identify three main strands. In the first and most exciting category were the experimental/intellectual designers, the Japanese in Paris; the young Britons, such as Vivienne Westwood, Bodymap, Katharine Hamnett and Betty Jackson; and the Antwerp group, which included Anne Demeulemeester, Martin Margiela and Dries van Noten. Then there were the modernist/minimalists headed by Giorgio Armani, Calvin Klein and Zoran.

  Holding the centre ground were what one might call the fantasists or romantics represented by the restrained, soft romanticism of Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld and the early Gianni Versace and more aggressively by the comic-strip boys whose vision of womanhood was a bit like Barbie takes a trip and gets a corset and a bit like the heroine from an erotic pulp sci-fi or horror comic. In this set the
most eclectic imagination belonged to Jean Paul Gaultier but Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana were both capable of giving their movie-inspired, pop-culture sirens large wardrobes which sometimes included moulded plastic breastplates with tip-tilted 1950s breasts, cinched torsos, bondage details and the highest of stilettos. However, the dress-me-as-a-vamp hero of the time was Azzedine Alaia, the diminutive Tunisian dubbed the ‘King of Cling’ by Women’s Wear Daily and ‘the Titan of Tight’ by Georgina Howell.

  In 1982 Brenda Polan was taken to meet Alaia in his cramped and crowded studio in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Introductions were performed by London-based retailer Joseph Ettedgui, who had introduced Kenzo to Britain and was about to do the same for Alaia. It was the only interview Polan had ever conducted sitting on a (closed) lavatory while the interviewee stood in the doorway. At that point the small man dressed all in black—black Nehru jacket, black cotton trousers, black velvet slippers—was suddenly and to his own surprise, the hottest name in Paris. There were no press clippings for some basic research so the bread-and-butter questions had to be asked. In response to one of the first Alaia was evasive but charming. ‘How old? Does it matter? I am as old as the pharaohs.’

  Chastened, Polan moved on. ‘Success? It is not important to me, not something I ever really cared about or desired. For me the work, the clothes, the customers, the women are the pleasure. I have never had possessions but I have always had people; they are what matters to me. The beautiful women, they matter to me. I am a sculptor and I can maybe make them more beautiful.’

  Alaia was born round about 1940 in Tunis and was raised by his grandmother, who enrolled him on a sculpture course at the École des Beaux-Arts. As Francois Boudot relates in his book in the Fashion Memoir series, ‘the history of art would have claimed another sculptor’ had not Alaia chosen to moonlight as an assistant for a local midwife, Madame Pineau. She kept fashion magazines in the waiting room of her clinic and, when his water-heating, towel-tidying duties permitted, the young Azzedine, already immersed in the world of women and the physical realities of their bodies, cultivated an addiction to fashion images. He was later to develop strong working relationships with many photographers, particularly Jean-Paul Goude.

  Alaia said his epiphany was the realisation that his future lay not in chiselling the female form in stone or modelling it in clay but in shaping it in cloth and leather. And, he knew, there was only one place to do that—Paris. His grandparents were initially alarmed at the idea but eventually, after the boy had taken a job with a dressmaker in Tunis to prove his commitment, his grandfather gave his permission. In 1957, Alaia arrived in Paris a prearranged job at Christian Dior. He lasted five days. Baudot writes that the Algerian war had broken out and a young Arab boy was not welcome. Alaia shrugs and says, no, he knew the clientele was too establishment for him. Beautiful women have always taken care of Azzedine, and in this case Simone Zehrfuss introduced him to Guy Laroche, for whom he worked for two seasons. Alaia learned but was not content.

  Alaia left Laroche and went to stay with the Comtesse de Blegiers in the sixteenth arrondissement. He looked after her children, helped with the cooking, worked on his first designs and, courtesy of the Comtesse, expanded his circle of friends and clients to include Louise de Vilmorin, Greta Garbo, Cecile de Rothschild and the actress Arletty, to whom he was particularly close. Eventually he moved out of the Comtesse’s kitchen and into the four rooms in the rue de Bellechasse that were to witness his ascendancy in the early 1980s. For a very long time, however, he functioned as a couturier or private dressmaker, a very well kept secret with a large and faithful clientele.

  Alaia became what he set out to be, a sculptor of female flesh. The couture tradition is, among other things, very much about imposing an ideal shape, the currently fashionable ideal shape, upon bodies that are not ideal. Because the great majority of couture customers are beyond the first flush of willowy youth, the bodies are often very far from ideal. So couture structures and techniques are calculated to lift and support, tighten and flatten, create curves where there are none and expunge bulges where there are many. Azzedine Alaia began to acquire these techniques at Laroche, but, during the 1960s and 1970s, he refined his skills by buying and dissecting a vast collection of vintage couture garments.

  Alaia applied these skills in a way that was uniquely his own, however. Using fabrics that could stretch and cling, he developed a cut that tenderly emphasised and enhanced all the female erogenous zones. Although he used jersey, knitwear and bias-cut woven fabrics, it was with Lycra-rich or Lycra-bonded fabrics that he made his unmistakable mark. He could also make leather—not always soft kid leather either and sometimes suggestively metal-studded—do things just the proper side of fetishism. Francois Baudot wrote, ‘The mischievous tailor, of course, took risks with his more daring customers. To show off their figures, he particularly emphasised the small of the back and the buttocks.’

  He would probably have continued as a private couturier if in-the-know fashion editors had not started pushing him, suggesting that he design some ready-to-wear. In 1979 he designed a raincoat and a suit for Madeleine Furs, and the two garments were photographed by Elle magazine. Encouraged by this and ensuing successes, Alaia began to think of a ready-to-wear line. It was launched in 1980, in the tiny apartment. There were no invitations. As ever, he relied on word of mouth. As ever, his faith in the fact that his inner circle would tell the right insiders where to be was absolute. After all, his women always looked after him.

  The collection was all black, big shouldered, caricature curvy and loaded with punk references—diagonal zips, pins and needles. The Parisian press adored it, and after the American photographer Bill Cunningham photographed it for Women’s Wear Daily (which coined one of its succinctly apposite labels and called it ‘second-skin dressing’), all America wanted it and beat a path to Alaia’s modest door. Perhaps most notably in that first collection Alaia invented a new garment, the body. The streamlined silhouette was central to his look, so he adapted the dancer’s leotard for everyday wear with skirt or trousers. The fashion body, unlike the dancer’s version, closed at the crotch, secured by poppers or small buttons. In 1985 Donna Karan was to popularise the body, basing her first collection of her own label around it.

  Reflecting in 1983, the journalist Marina Sturdza of the Toronto Star, explained that long before Alaia became the hottest story in Paris:

  his address has been a loosely kept secret of the Paris cognoscenti (such as internationally acclaimed interior designer, Andrée Putman, or the super-avant-garde editors of Elle magazine) for at least a decade. That’s why it’s a giggle to see the beau monde of fashion, press and buyers alike, rank and position regardless, protocol be damned, crammed by the dozen into a meagre space intended to accommodate a very few at best; craning and jostling to catch even a glimpse of Alaia’s models as they sporadically flash by. In fact, it’s not a showroom at all, it’s Alaia’s apartment, long since transformed into workroom/office/dressing room and feeding station. The bed lies under the drawing board, the drawing board is buried under an ocean of paper, the models dress in an antechamber, the international buyers are stacked in the vestibule, and life during the prêt-a-porter collections has become a round-the-clock state of siege.

  What they had all come to see were some of the sexiest clothes ever to grace an inadequate excuse for a catwalk. Apart from the zips, Alaia always chooses a clean and simple line with little in the way of decorative detail or fuss and prefers dark or neutral colours—the expensive palette of the very rich: black, navy, brown, beige, greige, taupe and soft pastels. His genius lies in the intricate cut and the way it displays the body—without vulgarity—revelling in pneumatic womanly curves. He works directly on the body, repeatedly draping, fitting and cutting. One inspiration was Madeleine Vionnet’s multi-seaming techniques and bias cuts; another was Charles James’s engineer’s obsession with a carapace-like structure.

  What was new was the freedom of movement that ca
me with Alaia’s alliance of stretch fabric and intricate structure. Feather light and unconstraining, these clothes permitted a woman to move in a way that was both modern and stride-out easy and, because she felt so sexy in them, terribly seductive. The husbands and lovers of Alaia’s customers are among his biggest fans and good friends.

  Alaia dominated Parisian ready-to-wear for a few seasons, opening boutiques in Paris, New York and Los Angeles, and influencing the mass market everywhere. But there were worse problems for the press and buyers than the discomfort of his shows. His fame could not help but attract many more private clients—including Tina Turner and Madonna—and as a consequence his attention was brutally divided. In addition his perfectionism meant an endless reworking of the clothes for his ready-to-wear collections, which became later and later. Initially one would have to stay on a couple of extra days in Paris to see his show, then it was a week, so one would fly back, but when it became a month, press and buyers became exasperated. In October 1986, Women’s Wear Daily chose to interpret Alaia’s dilatoriness and lack of professionalism as disdain for the hand that fed him—the major store groups in the United States—and ran an editorial saying his day was done.

  He riposted, ‘I’ll rub them out in a second—even the biggest customers. I’m not afraid of anyone, even the President of the United States.’ But WWD had not just power on its side; it had the right of it. Azzedine Alaia, influential as he was, did not move on when fashion moved on and, at the heart of the problem, he could not deliver the clothes into the stores when he said he would.

  In 1992 Alaia stopped producing ready-to-wear collections but when, in 2000, a 1980s revival resulted in Alaia tribute outfits on several catwalks, Patrizio Bertelli of Prada SpA bought Alaia’s company to add to its portfolio, which already included Helmut Lang and Jil Sander. The revival was not a success. In 2007 Prada sold the company back to Alaia, and he refinanced it with backing from the Companie Financiere Richemont, the luxury group that owns Cartier, Chloé and Dunhill. Richemont, Alaia told the International Herald Tribune, plans to set up an Alaia Foundation in the building next to his headquarters in the Marais. It will hold some 15,000 samples and patterns created over his thirty years in fashion.