Pieter Mulier’s Alaia show took place over a footbridge across the Seine as tourist boats passed beneath and onlookers clambered to watch from the walls of the Tuileries Gardens. It couldn’t have been more public—a strong contrast to the intimacy of his last presentation, which he held in his own apartment in Antwerp. “For me, that’s what it is about,” he declared afterward. “It’s about extremes. You know Alaia is high heels or flats.”
It wasn’t that the venue itself was so much of a surprise. Parisian bridges have been co-opted as runways several times in the past couple of weeks, although Mulier hinted afterwards that it was chosen because it holds a sentimental memory for him. “But what [memory], I can’t tell you,” he said. “That’s very personal. I found it the most beautiful view of Paris, because you look at the Grand Palais in one direction, Notre Dame the other, and you see the Eiffel Tower a little bit, just the tip of it. For me, I always thought it was pure luxury to sit on that bridge and just look around at everything.”
The bridge bristles with lovers’ padlocks bolted to its handrails. It seemed an apt environmental accessory to the obsessively sexualized, latex and visible-thong clad vision of women Mulier was unleashing on the world. “It’s the next step in what I want to say about Alaia,” he said. “Not fetish—that’s not a good word—but it’s personal obsessions that I wanted to do in a way that other people didn’t. Using latex, using leather in a different way. Creating a silhouette that’s very feminine, but yet quite different than what you see today.”
Kinky fashion has its own long Parisian tradition—there’s nothing new in seeing the proposal of chic bourgeois women in immaculate tailoring who also happen to be displaying underwear. These male-gaze luxury fashion tropes have a 50-year history that goes back as far as Yves Saint Laurent and Helmut Newton. The 21st-century set of questions for Mulier center more on how to handle the empathetic argument that Alaia always made for glorifying the physicality of womanhood; how to claim it as his own, and make it relevant in his own time.
Indeed ‘time’ was the overarching theme Mulier was talking about—in the sense of the time it had taken to mould and tailor the silhouettes and add obsessive details, “like 35 buttons on a coat.” You could see the time-consuming techniques lavished, say, on the opaque-sheer splicing of horizontal bands of strips of leather and gauzy fabric, winding in varying widths down a floor-length dress. The tailoring was nipped to the narrowest of pencil skirts; the taut knitwear engineered to expose the thonged bodysuits that are, of course, Alaia-central.
Fashion buffs will appreciate the meticulous labor that went into that, of course. Women, however, rarely fall for technique as the primary selling-point in a garment. The emotional pull and electricity always comes more from what a show gives off about how women want to frame themselves in social contexts. “Naked dressing” has been having a long post-pandemic streak. Mulier is perhaps adding in a theoretical way to the frank show-your-body conversation that Casey Cadwallader has been pushing at Mugler, or Nensi Dojaka has been doing in her own way with lingerie dressing in London.
What the show missed out on was the joyful self-glorification of female bodies that is now a spectacular part of pop culture. The narrowness of the casting excluded the embrace of curves that has been normalized by the young generation, and which they expect to see reflected back on runways. Granted, it takes technical know-how to engineer different sizes. Mulier has that at his disposal. It would be great to see him start to embrace a new vision of the Amazonian power that Azzedine Alaia invested in women—the part that’s as much about the soul and the pulse of the brand, as it is about the body.
