Couture, Closely

An intimate reading of Dior and Alaïa through cut, structure, and restraint.

- By TRUSHIETA NARINGREKAR

Azzedine Alaïa's collection was never designed for display. For years, Dior garments lived quietly in his world—handled, returned to, studied between fittings and sketches rather than stored away as history. Dresses were approached as material rather than memory. Seams were traced. Structures examined. What interested Alaïa was not how a garment looked at first glance, but how it held itself together. That way of looking comes into focus this autumn, as La Galerie Dior and the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa present a rare double exhibition shaped by study rather than spectacle.

At La Galerie Dior, more than a hundred Dior creations drawn from Alaïa's personal archive are revealed publicly for the first time. Seen together, they resist nostalgia. The garments speak in technical terms: balance, proportion, internal logic. Dior's New Look silhouettes, often framed as romantic milestones, appear here as precise constructions—softness supported by engineering, volume disciplined through structure. Skirts float, but with intention. Bodices shape the body without excess. These were the qualities that kept Alaïa returning to Dior across decades, treating the archive as an ongoing source of learning.