To celebrate its 20th anniversary, the SCAD FASH fashion school in Lacoste is organizing a tribute exhibition to Azzedine Alaïa

A legendary carreer

Lacoste’s SCAD FASH (Savannah College of Art and Design, USA) is organizing a tribute exhibition to Azzedine Alaïa from June 27 to October 29, 2022 with a selection of outfits from the couturier’s archives. For memo, the SCAD invested the village of Lacoste, in the Luberon. At the heart of this enclosure, the SCAD FASH are two buildings dedicated to fashion exhibitions. Tracing Alaïa’s entire legendary career, L’Art de la Mode skilfully presents 20 blouses, elegant suits and other superbly cut creations from the designer’s archives, which evoke his timeless aesthetic and testify to his artistic triumphs.

Alaïa’s mastery of the silhouette

The exhibition highlights Alaïa’s mastery of the silhouette, his iconic status as a virtuoso of fit and proportion, and his gift for constructing garments that remain unrivaled in accentuating feminine forms. Born in Tunisia, Alaïa was by nature creative and attracted to the arts from an early age. A sculptor trained at the School of Fine Arts in Tunis, he moved to Paris in the mid-1950s and began working for the Christian Dior house and perfected his art in the haute couture workshops of Guy Laroche and Thierry Mugler. After cultivating a loyal following of Parisian high society women, the designer opened his Maison Alaïa in 1979 and was immediately revered nationally for his iconic bodycon silhouette. He was rightly called the “King of Cling”.

A designer of the body

A veritable designer of the body, Alaïa defined a feminine ideal in which the most glamorous women of her time, from Greta Garbo to Tina Turner, including elite top models and muses Naomi Campbell, Stephanie Seymour, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, along with a coterie of dedicated clients around the world, have found the true image of themselves. A constant innovator, Alaïa saw fashion as an art form and was involved in every step of the design process, meticulously constructing garments meant to drape and accentuate the female body to perfection.