Fashion Issue, Azzedine Alaïa Photographer: Franck Juery

Before passing in 2017 at the age of 82, Azzedine Alaïa was one of the world’s great living couturiers—more an artist than simply a fashion designer. Starting in the ’70s, he made a name for himself not just for his meticulous approach to creating clothes, but also for his kindness, trenchant wit, and aversion to press coverage and awards. High-profile power women—Naomi Campbell, Carine Roitfeld, and Michelle Obama number among the devoted—have been wearing his figure-flattering, clingy, swingy knit dresses and goddess gowns since 1979. It was then that the native Tunisian, after working for Guy Laroche and Christian Dior, first hung out a shingle at a tiny apartment on the rue de Bellechasse in Paris. In 2008, he added “gallerist” to his résumé when he opened his namesake space, Galerie Azzedine Alaïa, in Paris, where he showed work by the likes of Jean Nouvel, Claude Parent, the Syrian poet Adonis, and his partner, the artist Christoph von Weyhe. The gallery was physically the largest component of his vast, Gustave Eiffel–era headquarters in Paris’s Marais neighborhood where almost everything in Alaïa’s world happened, with the kitchen at the center of it all (his lunch and dinner parties were legendary). Alaïa graced the cover of Surface's Fashion Issue (131) in 2016, one of the last magazine covers before his death.

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