Azzedine Alaïa and Christian Dior, Two Masters of Haute Couture

In 1956, Paris was no longer the distant horizon that the young Azzedine Alaïa gazed at dreamily as he leafed through fashion magazines. Leaving Tunis with nothing but a letter of recommendation in his pocket, he arrived in the capital and, killing two birds with one stone, crossed the threshold of the largest fashion house. Encouraged by Habiba Menchari, a figurehead of women’s emancipation in Tunisia and mother of Leila, a close friend, Azzedine Alaïa arrived at the airport and went straight to the Champ de Mars, to the home of Madame Lévy-Despas, a client of Christian Dior. She found him an internship in the workshops. At a time when Dior’s fashion dominated the world and the decade, the couturier of the New Look was still alive. Alaïa arrived on tiptoe on June 25, 1956, but only stayed a few days in the workshops on Rue François 1er. Sometimes life decides otherwise.

But the budding couturier would harbour boundless admiration for Dior, whose dresses, veritable architectures of levitating petticoats, never ceased to fascinate him. The first dresses that Alaïa made for a few clients summed up his passion for the Parisian-style dresses so glamorously mastered by Christian Dior. These cocktail dresses, which, in his words, ‘seemed to stand up on their own,’ led him to the mysteries of cutting that he sought to solve throughout his life, becoming himself the most virtuoso couturier of his time.

Throughout his career, Alaïa’s work remained a silent witness to the youthful impression Dior’s suits and coats, short and long dresses had made on him. He shared Dior’s taste for accentuated waists, sculpted shoulders, curved hips and voluminous skirts. They were also united by a shared heritage of refined fabrics and colours, such as the immoderate use of all shades of black and grey, which transformed dresses into timeless statements.

A couturier who never refused the lessons of his masters and predecessors, whose documents and creations he tracked down, Alaïa was also an inspired and extravagant collector. Throughout his life, he acquired more than 500 Christian Dior designs, thus protecting them from possible loss or damage.

The exhibition ‘Azzedine Alaïa and Christian Dior, Two Masters of Haute Couture’ brings together nearly 70 designs by the two couturiers. Archives from the 1950s and creations by Azzedine Alaïa, all from the collections he painstakingly assembled and which are now preserved in his foundation, engage in a subtle dialogue. Despite the decades that separate them, formal agreements, colour combinations, similarities in ornamentation and inspiration attest to the reconciliation of fashion and time that these two great couturiers naturally led and governed.