It takes a lot to distract from Rihanna. Especially when she enters a room wearing a cleavage-spilling corset underneath a cream net gown with hundreds of seed pearls caught in its web, sits next to Liv Tyler and starts whispering in her ear.
It takes a lot to upstage a mini-reunion of supermodels: Stephanie Seymour in leopard, hugging Naomi Campbell and both of them air-kissing Linda Evangelista, as Amber Valletta, all in black, smiles benignly at the scene.
Yet that is exactly what Pieter Mulier did Friday night with an Alaïa show at the Guggenheim Museum that redefined chic in audience, venue and style. After three years of negotiating, not always easily, with the heritage of the house Azzedine built, he finally made it his own.
Holding the first fashion show to take place in the Guggenheim’s soaring atrium with its spiraling Frank Lloyd ramp twirling up to the domed glass ceiling, Mr. Mulier sat his guests — an idiosyncratic mix of gallerists, artists, photographers and fashion folk — on round settees on the ground floor, and then sent the models strolling from top to bottom. At first all the audience could see as they craned their necks back were little heads, bobbing along just above the uppermost part of the ramp. Then shoulders. Then perhaps a torso or two.
Finally, the whole thing: a collage of spirals and geometry, form and function that took the essence of sportswear and made it modern. Skin-toned bandeaus were paired with classic Alaïa skater shirts, but rendered lightly in layers of silk chiffon, and billowy trousers that looked like a cross between harem pants and sweatpants (harem sweats?). Later, panniers were added at the hips, as if they had been crossbred with a ball gown and recast in silk taffeta.
Chubby coats were composed of swirls of woolly wadding to reflect the swirls of the museum, in chalky pink and cream, or made from hundreds of corkscrew curls, like the dripping fronds of a wisteria. Or maybe a massive pot of fusilli pasta. Tunics came in sheer metal mesh.
And in a eye-popping feat of fashion architecture, strapless sci-fi Greek goddess gowns made from hundreds of tiny pleats of silk jersey were engineered to snap onto the body with no visible straps, zips or closures, and made to expose a river of skin curving continuously from breastbone to ribs and waist, and then on down the leg to the ankle.
Last season, at Alaïa’s usual slot during the couture shows in Paris — the label sits somewhere in the netherworld between couture and ready-to-wear — Mr. Mulier showed a similar dress in which the top snaked around the torso with the technology of a snap wristband. The powers that be at the Guggenheim, it turned out, had seen this dress, and in it had seen themselves (or at least their museum). They contacted Mr. Mulier, and thus a relationship was born.
Or perhaps revived: In 2000, the Guggenheim Museum in New York held an Alaïa show that imagined a conversation between Mr. Alaïa’s work and that of Andy Warhol; in 2004, the museum bestowed upon the designer a special award. There has always been an aesthetic mind meld of shorts between the label and the institution. By returning, Mr. Mulier was, in a sense, bringing Alaïa home.
But he was also freeing himself from the burden and expectations that have seemed to sit heavily on his shoulders in Paris, where, after all, Mr. Alaïa lived and worked and, at least in his later years, served as a sort of fashion oracle for generations of other designers who came to eat at his table and sup on his words.
Coming to New York provided Mr. Mulier not so much a fresh start as an opportunity for recontextualization. And for engaging with the ease and simplicity of the American sportswear tradition, one Mr. Mulier knows from his much lauded but ill-fated two years at Calvin Klein with Raf Simons, and one rooted in references to Halston and Pauline Trigère. The result was an edge of relaxed insouciance that celebrates the body without limiting it. The values are those of Mr. Alaïa, but the expression is Mr. Mulier’s.
He also showed a terrific triangular prism bag, slung sideways like a backpack or worn at the waist like a belt, and jewelry made of thin filaments of leather or silver threaded through each ear, sometimes connected into a necklace a la headphones.
In 1985, three years after Bergdorf Goodman introduced his line, Mr. Alaïa himself came to New York and held a sizzling show in the Palladium before an audience of celebrities and artists and culture shapers (Ms. Seymour was also at that one — on the runway). It turned out to be something of a landmark in the story of the brand.
This could be another one.
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