A new show at London’s Design Museum, conceived with couturier Azzedine Alaïa before his death last year, celebrates his extraordinary cut and dash with the help of a few friends
Alaïa had prepared the exhibition with gallerist Carla Sozzani, curator Mark Wilson, and the co-director of the Design Museum Alice Black. Entitled ‘Azzedine Alaïa: The Couturier’, it will showcase more than 60 outstanding pieces in front of a series of five monumental screens. ‘There has never been an Alaïa show in London. He did not stage big fashion shows and while he was an icon, he was also quite private,’ says Sozzani, founder of Galleria Carla Sozzani and 10 Corso Como in Milan. ‘People don’t necessarily know about his work so it’s wonderful to have this show – the first fashion exhibition at the Design Museum’s Kensington location.’
‘We saw the show as an installation rather than a retrospective,’ says Wilson, who had masterminded two Alaïa shows in 1997 and 2011 at the Netherlands’ Groninger Museum, where he works as chief curator. He came up with the idea for the screens to highlight the sculptural qualities of Alaïa’s clothes: ‘The architectural interventions allow for a 360-degree take on every piece. And it was obvious as to who would make them, as Alaïa had such great relationships with those designers and collected their work.’
This story is from the June 2018 edition of Wallpaper.
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This story is from the June 2018 edition of Wallpaper.
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