Azzedine Alaïa had a philosophy about preservation. “A dress holds three memories,” he would say. “The memory of the couturier who made it, the atelier that realized it, and the woman who wore it.”
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For nearly 40 years, Alaïa quietly assembled what is considered the largest private fashion archive on record: some 20,000 pieces, acquired from 1968 until his death in 2017. That he collected around 600 Christian Dior designs—most by Dior himself—reflected his lifelong interest in the couturier’s dresses, once commenting that they seemed to “stand up all by themselves.”
Opening tomorrow at La Galerie Dior in Paris, “Alaïa’s Dior Collection” is essentially the story of how one couturier meticulously preserved the heritage of another. Of the 140 pieces on display, 101 are loans from the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa, which will present its own exhibition of the two couturiers next month.
Here, there are no designs from Alaïa, yet visitors will sense his eye—and how curators Olivier Saillard, director of the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa, in collaboration with Gaël Mamine along with Olivier Flaviano, director of La Galerie Dior, convey his admiration across the thematic rooms. From the Rose des Vents taffeta evening dress (1956) in the same gray-ish pink as Dior’s house in Granville that appears early on, to Caracas (1957), an afternoon dress with a beautiful portrait neckline that Sophia Loren was photographed wearing, what attracted Alaïa were the silhouettes—the invention of “the line.”
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But Dior, more than any other fashion house in Alaïa’s collection, represented a personal connection, too. Arriving in Paris from Tunisia, he brought a letter of recommendation from a former client to the Dior ateliers, where he was subsequently hired. Visitors will find his original employee contract—a single, grid-lined card noting a start date of June 26, 1956—among the multitude of historical documents, sketches, photographs, collection sheets, press releases (written by Dior himself), and magazine covers that complement and contextualize the creations.
Usually, La Galerie Dior mixes designers from across the house’s history—Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons, Maria Grazia Chiuri, and now Jonathan Anderson. At one point during our visit, Flaviano says, “I don’t think we’ve ever had so much Dior at the gallery.” Indeed, the idea formed when Mamine, an archivist at the Fondation Alaïa began classifying Alaïa’s collection by couturier and discovered what the Dior selection entailed. He contacted Dior Héritage and they responded immediately, offering to photograph, authenticate, and date every garment. Both institutions realized they held something extraordinary.
A model called Patchouli anchors the architecture section—a conceptual piece that captures both designers’ approaches to construction. A 1949 dress from Lucien Lelong, where Dior worked before launching his house, shows his developing hand. The contrast of fabrics, the optical work is
“very Alaïa-like,” Saillard observes.
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Then there’s the ballroom with its superlative display of evening gowns and a greater range of house designers. Yet a 1949 model called Gruau, photographed by Richard Avedon with stark lighting, makes the most transporting statement.
With Balenciaga, says Saillard, Alaïa favored monochromatic black pieces. With Dior, he sought everything: architectural coats, floral dresses, sculpted suits, evening gowns. He aimed for the most complete representation of Dior’s work possible, collecting pieces that demonstrate technical mastery—complex pleating, innovative cutting, construction that reveals the hand of a master. “Walking through it now, I ultimately believe this exhibition responds to the idea of ‘What is a couturier’ more than any other since the Galerie has opened,” says Flaviano. “This is the collection of a couturier.”
And the archival display is unprecedented. Dior would draw 600 to 800 sketches per collection. The studio selected 200 for the ateliers. Those became toiles—three-dimensional sketches in muslin. The refinement continued until approximately 180 models appeared on show day. For one dress—Zélie, from the 1954 H line collection—visitors trace the complete creative journey: Dior’s initial sketch, the atelier assignment, the pattern, photographs on the staircase at 30 Avenue Montaigne, press descriptions, and final magazine coverage. Oxford, a two-piece afternoon suit with light stripes from the Tulipe line, is presented up-close and on the cover of the Spring issue of Elle magazine.
“Haute couture is not just a story of embroidery,” Saillard explains as we gaze at an A-line coat dress in navy. “It’s a story of volume. Cutting a dress—if you cut it here or there, it’s not the same. There is a correct height. If it were longer, it would’’t be the same. If shorter, it would be ridiculous.”
Alaïa started collecting at a time when couture houses had not yet grasped the importance of their own archives. Dior didn’t establish its archive department until 1987—nearly 20 years after Alaïa began. “We knew he had a large collection, because everyone saw him buying,” Saillard recalls. “He once told me about Madame Grès, ‘I don’t have many; I have a few.’ I inventoried 900.”
Unsurprisingly, even if over four decades, this would have been a colossal investment beyond any museum’s wildest dreams. And if you are wondering, Alaïa never exhibited his collection during his lifetime. According to Saillard, when asked about his plans, he would say, ‘We’ll see.’ He had a strange relationship with death. He lied about his age. His grandmother lived past 100; he hoped to reach 104.”
But he completed the legal work to establish a public-utility foundation, ensuring the collection would remain inalienable—protected forever from sale or dispersal. “I have a sense he meant, ‘I buy these, and they’ll do it after,’” Saillard says.
The Fondation Azzedine Alaïa opens its own Alaïa–Dior exhibition on December 14, continuing the dialogue between two masters who understood that fashion, at its highest level, is architecture for the body.
“What moves me deeply,” Saillard continues, “is that for 40, 50 years, before the houses or museums did this work, Azzedine bought and saved a heritage for France. Not just anywhere—for France. Azzedine, from a simple background, from Tunisia, is the only one in fashion history who saved the heritage of fashion. No one else did this work.”
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