How Kaia Gerber Came To Star In Alaïa’s Latest Campaign

Anyone who watches the red carpet will remember Kaia Gerber’s star turn at the Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles three months ago. Fresh from the spring/summer 2023 Alaïa runway, the plum-coloured draped skirt and sheer black voile jersey bodysuit she wore fit Gerber like a glove, as Alaïa designs often do. What made the look uncanny – and iconic – was that in it Gerber bore a stronger-than-usual resemblance to her mother Cindy Crawford, who made her own star turns in Alaïa. See spring/summer 1987 and autumn/winter 1989, for starters.

The look came together, according to Alaïa’s Pieter Mulier, when the creative director reconnected with Gerber in Paris last autumn after several years. Back in 2017, when she was taking her first strides on the runways, Gerber made her New York Fashion Week debut at Calvin Klein 205W39NYC, where Mulier worked alongside Raf Simons.

“I was so impressed with how she’s grown up,” Mulier said on a call earlier this week. “There’s this whole thing about nepo babies now, but Kaia represents something. She’s actually quite important for that generation – one of the rare top models we have nowadays, and she’s becoming an actress. She’s at the point of her life where she’s heading towards something bigger.” The decision to put her in the house’s spring/summer 2023 campaign, he went on, “was very simple.”

Think of the intimate, off-season shows Alaïa staged in his Paris atelier, the clique of model muses who came back season after season, and the kitchen where he liked to gather them together for home-cooked meals. “The idea of family is so important at Alaïa,” Mulier said. “And I think because her mother had such a close relationship with Alaïa, Kaia thought it was actually quite beautiful to have that same relationship again.”

Of course, Mulier’s family looks different than Alaïa’s did. For the new campaign, the British photographer Tyrone Lebon photographed Gerber on the roof of the artist Sterling Ruby’s studio in LA. “I didn’t want a big set. You know, fashion sets nowadays, they’re so big, so big. It’s 50 people on set. Here it was only hair and make-up, Tyrone, an assistant, a stylist, Kaia, and her boyfriend [Austin Butler], nobody else. So it felt more like a ’90s shoot, remember when Calvin sent Kate [Moss] and Mario [Sorrenti] on holiday? It felt more like that – nothing orchestrated, nothing merchandised.”

“What’s most important is that it was shot in – how do you say? – a family situation. There was no merchandising on set, there was no art director on set. I quite believe in the energy between a photographer and a model. I wasn’t there either,” he went on. “I told them a little bit what I like, but I told Tyron to be inspired the most by the lights, by the space of Sterling, of course by the beauty of Kaia, but that it was his eye that I wanted, not my eye. Nowadays, everything’s pre-chewed, pre-fabricated. I quite liked the idea that it was just them to doing their thing and that’s it. Basically, I want more than natural way of how it used to be.”

Speaking of fashion’s past lives, for spring 2023 inspiration Mulier went back “way to the beginning of Azzedine, to the first shows, where everything was draped, minimally and naturally. It was squares: two points that you drape onto a body and that’s it,” he explained. “The first show that Azzedine ever did [for spring/summer 1983], for me it’s genius.” For autumn/winter 2023, he’ll be adapting another Azzedine-ism. Though it’s a bit too soon to share his plans, Mulier did say this: “With everything going on in fashion, people traveling all around the world to see the most amazing sets that cost millions, what we’re planning is actually very simple. It will feel very Alaïa.”