|
Having earned recognition and legitimacy within the world of French haute couture, Azzedine Alaïa took great pleasure, throughout his career, in drawing inspiration from a country and a continent that he had left at an early age but which continued to hold a profound fascination for him.
The exhibition “Azzedine Alaïa and Africa” brings together for the first time the couturier’s creations around a subject that served as a guiding thread through three collections in particular: those of Spring/Summer 1988, 1989 and 1990. Through these collections, the couturier set out to explore natural colours, twine and mastic. From shells and braided raffia, he fashioned dresses that were true signatures upon the memories of a continent glimpsed more in spirit than in flesh.
Through some fifty garnments, it is the moucharabiehs of his native Tunisia that the couturier invites us to discover in his perforated shirt dresses. Whites as pure as the lime wash spread across sun-drenched walls, glittering. Deep blacks suggest darker allusions of dress. The sand and earth tones of sub-Saharan territories lay down a chromatic range at once infinite and certain. Alluding to Egypt, the bandage dresses assert their solemnity, freighted with history.
On the first floor of the foundation, next to Azzedine Alaïa’s atelier, photographs by his friend Peter Beard are on display. Memories of a journey they took together through Maasai country in 1996, they evoke the trip to Kenya from which the couturier returned overflowing with enthusiasm and emotion — rediscovering the contours of his creative imagination.
|
