Before Pieter Mulier, Rihanna, and the Guggenheim Museum, there was Azzedine Alaïa, Pat Cleveland, and Bergdorf Goodman.
As you’ll know if you read our review or listened to our latest The Run-Through podcast, Mulier decamped to New York City to present his latest collection for Alaïa at the Guggenheim Museum this season. Rihanna was in attendance, as were Linda Evangelista, Liv Tyler, and Naomi Campbell. It was, for lack of a better word, major.
Following the show, Mulier and Alaïa hosted “Alaïa In Warhol’s Eyes” at the Brant Foundation, an exhibition curated by the New York-based interior designer Martin Brûlé featuring a set of prints of extremely rare photographs by Andy Warhol of past Alaïa-meets-New York happenings
First is a 1982 show at Bergdorf Goodman, which effectively launch the Alaïa label as we know it stateside and of which there are very few photographs available. Azzedine Alaïa had been working as a couturier in Paris since the ’60s, but it was New York that gave him the impulse to launch his ready-to-wear line and formalize the maison in the ’80s. Legend goes that Dawn Mello, the then-director of Bergdrof Goodman, extended the designer an invitation to show in New York, and that it was none other than Thierry Mugler who encouraged him to accept.
Mello had seen Alaïa’s designs in Bill Cunningham’s style photographs of fashion editors including Nicole Crassat and Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele—Alaïa often credited Cunningham for helping him become known in the US. Mugler helped Alaïa with the show’s casting, and, in September of 1982, Alaïa held his first New York fashion show at Bergdorf Goodman with Crassat, Paloma Picasso, and Andy Warhol all in attendance. Following the show, Alaïa said that the volume of orders for his tight RTW outing allowed him to make more samples to expand the line.
The exhibition features two other Alaïa-takes-New York minutes. The first is a 1986 birthday party in which the designer was photographed with Warhol—with what we can assume is the artist’s camera—and Iman. The other is a “To Care is to Cure” benefit at the Javits Center, also in 1986, in which Alaïa was photographed by Warhol with a baby-faced Veronica Webb, who became a staple on his runways, plus Keith Haring, Grace Jones, and other Manhattan fixtures. As a treat straight from the archives of the Andy Warhol Foundation and on the last day of New York Fashion Week, scroll through to find seven images from the exhibition.
