ピーター・ムリエールがレストリクションとリリースでアライアを進化させる

Body consciousness is a fashion idiom so overused it has become virtually meaningless: after all, what does it really mean to be conscious of your body, and how to reflect that in clothes? It isn’t just about something tight – although Azzedine Alaïa was hurrahed, in the 1980s, as the original ‘king of cling’, the torsion of his silhouettes was conscious of the body in a deeper, more meaningful way. Suspended from unconventional points, composed of rippling, taut bands of fabric or intricately engineered topographies crafted from a multitude of pattern pieces, they ebbed and flowed with a body’s movement, emphasising and embracing, masterpieces of restriction and release. 

Pieter Mulier was fixated on the idea of tension this season – yet, in a wider sense than just body and cloth. “A tension between genders, between excess and restraint, covering and revealing, between our history and our future, cultural forces,” he stated before his latest Alaïa show, encompassing a sweep of themes and ideas expressed through clothes that were conscious of the body in multiple manners. 

Yes, some dresses were tight – extraordinarily so. Those pieces were tugged around extremities in extreme fashion, capes stretched from fingertips and skirt hems pulled tight, intentionally hooked under heels like a wardrobe snafu refined to couture level. Those dresses looked like second skins, yet will transform and release as soon as a woman sits, moves her arms, or indeed lives her life. Some dresses, easily draped, had a panel of hand-blown glass laced into the décolletage like an armoured breastplate, both emphasising and protecting the figure beneath. “They’re some of the most beautiful we’ve ever done,” said Mulier. Others were loose, wide-hipped trousers lassoed to the ankle and sliced open down the side, ball skirts chopped hem to hip to match, while jackets in papery cotton were widely cut around the figure in motion. Those delineated the body, again, albeit through concealment in style that nodded to Asiatic or North African dress – the latter, of course, the origins of Alaïa himself. 

And there was a direct consciousness of the body in the show itself, staged in the former Fondation Cartier with an expansive video screen as floor, projecting images of the models as each walked across its surface. Overhead, a mirror amplified those views of the body, each woman caught between images of herself. Perhaps it was a comment on the tension of our image-saturated society – especially in terms of women, trapped by their own image and its reflection? Or maybe it was just about an awesome kind of beauty, something mind-boggling and multifaceted, like the identities of femininity today? 

How else could we be conscious of a body? How about clothes that literally broke open with its movement, framing the form in locomotion? That was the case with extraordinary dresses knitted to resemble feathers or strings of pearls shifting against the torso, or layers of fringe that shattered around the legs as the models walked. “I wanted clothes that cry,” was Mulier’s simple explanation of this reconsideration of what fabric is, what it can do. If the video screens scrambled vision, the clothes themselves were even more remarkable, crammed with ideas and bravely pushing forms forward.

That felt very Alaïa. Indeed, there were plenty of echoes of Alaïa throughout – both Azzedine and Mulier’s own reinvention of the house. That in itself is innovative, in a season fixated more than any in living memory on the new and the next. Rather than novelty or recycled innovation, Mulier continued to tread his own path at Alaïa, in an entirely singular fashion. If his clothes were crying, it was with joy. 

Body consciousness is a fashion idiom so overused it has become virtually meaningless: after all, what does it really mean to be conscious of your body, and how to reflect that in clothes? It isn’t just about something tight – although Azzedine Alaïa was hurrahed, in the 1980s, as the original ‘king of cling’, the torsion of his silhouettes was conscious of the body in a deeper, more meaningful way. Suspended from unconventional points, composed of rippling, taut bands of fabric or intricately engineered topographies crafted from a multitude of pattern pieces, they ebbed and flowed with a body’s movement, emphasising and embracing, masterpieces of restriction and release. 

Pieter Mulier was fixated on the idea of tension this season – yet, in a wider sense than just body and cloth. “A tension between genders, between excess and restraint, covering and revealing, between our history and our future, cultural forces,” he stated before his latest Alaïa show, encompassing a sweep of themes and ideas expressed through clothes that were conscious of the body in multiple manners. 

Yes, some dresses were tight – extraordinarily so. Those pieces were tugged around extremities in extreme fashion, capes stretched from fingertips and skirt hems pulled tight, intentionally hooked under heels like a wardrobe snafu refined to couture level. Those dresses looked like second skins, yet will transform and release as soon as a woman sits, moves her arms, or indeed lives her life. Some dresses, easily draped, had a panel of hand-blown glass laced into the décolletage like an armoured breastplate, both emphasising and protecting the figure beneath. “They’re some of the most beautiful we’ve ever done,” said Mulier. Others were loose, wide-hipped trousers lassoed to the ankle and sliced open down the side, ball skirts chopped hem to hip to match, while jackets in papery cotton were widely cut around the figure in motion. Those delineated the body, again, albeit through concealment in style that nodded to Asiatic or North African dress – the latter, of course, the origins of Alaïa himself. 

And there was a direct consciousness of the body in the show itself, staged in the former Fondation Cartier with an expansive video screen as floor, projecting images of the models as each walked across its surface. Overhead, a mirror amplified those views of the body, each woman caught between images of herself. Perhaps it was a comment on the tension of our image-saturated society – especially in terms of women, trapped by their own image and its reflection? Or maybe it was just about an awesome kind of beauty, something mind-boggling and multifaceted, like the identities of femininity today? 

How else could we be conscious of a body? How about clothes that literally broke open with its movement, framing the form in locomotion? That was the case with extraordinary dresses knitted to resemble feathers or strings of pearls shifting against the torso, or layers of fringe that shattered around the legs as the models walked. “I wanted clothes that cry,” was Mulier’s simple explanation of this reconsideration of what fabric is, what it can do. If the video screens scrambled vision, the clothes themselves were even more remarkable, crammed with ideas and bravely pushing forms forward.

That felt very Alaïa. Indeed, there were plenty of echoes of Alaïa throughout – both Azzedine and Mulier’s own reinvention of the house. That in itself is innovative, in a season fixated more than any in living memory on the new and the next. Rather than novelty or recycled innovation, Mulier continued to tread his own path at Alaïa, in an entirely singular fashion. If his clothes were crying, it was with joy.