Pieter Mulier’s Alaia performance was held on a footbridge over the Seine, with cruise ships passing under the bridge and onlookers climbing the walls of the Tuileries gardens. The speech could not have been more public, in stark contrast to the intimacy of the last one he gave at his own apartment in Antwerp. “To me, that’s what it’s about,” he later declared. “It’s about extreme things. You know Alaia’s heels and flats.”
Not that the venue itself is anything but surprising. The bridges of Paris have been chosen as the runway several times over the past few weeks, although Muriel hinted afterwards that it was chosen because it carried his emotional memory. “But what [the memory], I can’t tell you,” he said. “It’s very personal. I find it’s the most beautiful view of Paris because you look at the Grand Palais from one direction and Notre Dame from the other and you see a little bit of the Eiffel Tower, just a corner of it .. For me, I’ve always thought sitting on a bridge and looking around is a pure luxury.”
The bridge is covered with lovers’ padlocks bolted to the bridge’s handrails superior. It seemed like an apt ambient accessory for the woman-obsessed vision of sex, latex and sheer thongs that Muriel unleashed on the world. “That’s what I want to say about Alaia’s next step,” he said. “Not a fetish – that’s not a good word – but it’s my personal obsession and I wanted to do it in a way that other people didn’t want to do. Using latex, using leather in a different way. Creating a A very feminine silhouette, but nothing like what you see today.”
Weird fashion has its long Parisian heritage – see proposals for chic bourgeois women in Paris Nothing new. The perfectly cut one also happens to show off underwear. These luxury fashion tropes of the male gaze have been around for
years, dating back to Yves Saint Laurent and Helmut Newton. Muriel’s series of questions in the 21 century centered more on how to deal with the empathy arguments that Araya always made to glorify women’s bodies; how to claim it as his own and make it relevant to his own time.
In fact, “time” is the overarching theme Muriel is talking about – in the sense of the time it takes to shape and customize silhouettes and add fascinating details, “It’s like 21 buttons on a coat.” You can see the time-consuming techniques, say, of combining strips of leather and horizontal strips of tulle fabric in opaque and transparent splicing, in different The width wrapped around a floor-length dress. Tailoring was compressed down to the narrowest of pencil skirts; taut knits were meant to expose thong bodysuits, which, of course, were Alaia’s centerpiece.
