With Paris Fashion Week winding down, everyone starts looking for excuses to keep walking the city a little longer. On Rue de la Verrerie, you won’t have to look too hard for one. A perfectly round black door cuts through a wall of stone, marked only by two precise As. That’s your cue, the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa. Inside, you’ll find an exhibition titled Azzedine Alaïa and Christian Dior: Two Masters of Haute Couture, expect exactly what it says.
Curated by Olivier Saillard, the exhibition pits two couture immortals in a tête-à-tête that could have first happened in 1956… or in pure imagination. Fresh off his arrival in Paris from Tunisia, Alaïa briefly landed at the Dior atelier. Internships can be fun. Short too. This one lasted four days, but it never really left him. Dior’s dresses fascinated him, not for how they looked, but how they held. Alaïa started there and the obsession with cut stayed. So did the need to master it.
Almost 600 Dior designs later, the fascination hadn’t worn off. If Dior had a most devoted collector, it was Alaïa. “He felt he was saving treasures… He was a custodian. He spent what he earned acquiring the work of other masters. He didn’t have a private plane. He didn’t go on vacation. He collected, collected,” Carla Sozzani told Vogue. Dior archives spent two years with the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa, documenting, cataloguing, photographing. Alaïa next to Dior, garment by garment.
The exhibition shows what dedication looks like, and how strangers can sneak under your skin, beautifully. And don’t you dare step outside once you’ve seen every gown. Upstairs, guests step into Alaïa’s studio, frozen in time for two years after his death. Not a single thing was moved. Glass walls let you see him at work. Glasses, medicines, patterns, half-finished dresses, and your very own goosebumps.
