Azzedine Alaïa: The Final Interview

Shortly before his death at the end of last year, Azzedine Alaïa gave Vogue his final interview telling Tim Blanks about the world he created and his 30-year friendship with Naomi Campbell.

A week before his heart failed him in November, Azzedine Alaïacalled his friend Latifa, whose husband had just passed away at the age of 95. “Azzedine, we are all getting old,” Latifa said, “and soon we will join him.” According to the family friend who told me this story, Azzedine replied, “Go without me, I still have things to do here.” He was 82, but everything about his life was so prodigious that there was no reason at all to assume it would end a few days later.

There are always ironies attendant on unexpected deaths. A few months back, I was asked who I’d most like to interview in fashion that I’d never actually got to talk to. I’d said Alaïa. From my lips to whoever’s ears… Voguecalled soon after. Would I write a piece on the designer’s decades-long relationship with Naomi Campbell, a bond so close she called him Papa? There was so much that felt right about the proposal, mostly because I would get to spend time with them both at Alaïa’s place on Rue de Moussy. This was the 14,000sq ft heart of his world, where his apartment, his atelier, his showroom and shop were located, where he had opened a three-room hotel and a gallery. But, more than all of that, I would get to plumb the very soul of Alaïa’s being – his kitchen.

As soon as I started going to shows in Paris in the late 1980s, I’d heard about Alaïa’s kitchen – the long lunches, the late dinners he’d host for close friends and select invitees. These casual get-togethers had attained an almost mythic status as a nexus of everyone and everything that was special in fashion, the inner-est of inner circles, the illuminati of style, with Alaïa – never not dressed in his signature black Chinese cotton pyjamas – wielding the pots and pans in concert with his longtime cook, Soumare, to produce dishes that were simple but, from the invariably mouthwatering accounts of those who were there, supernal. It was impossible not to make a connection between Azzedine’s passion for hospitality and the extraordinary clothes he designed for a clientele who would have walked on gilded splinters for him: the appeal to the senses, the compelling desire to whip nature into shape, the sheer physical enjoyment of life that infused his food and his fashion – and his love of sharing all that.

It was genetic. If you’ve ever spent time with Tunisians, you’ll know that an open house is second nature to them. Alaïa was raised in Tunis by his maternal grandmother, Manoubia. She taught him to cook. Family meant food. Food meant family. The night Naomi met him, in July 1987, she was a 16-year-old novice in Paris who’d just been relieved of money, passport, everything, by a thief. Azzedine made her dinner, cooking and serving everything himself. “I didn’t say a word, because I didn’t speak French,” she remembers. They called her mum in London to translate. Azzedine promised Valerie he’d take care of her daughter. It was a promise he did his best to keep, even as Naomi balked at his efforts to control her wayward teenage whims. “I would be very angry when she was sneaking out during the night, taking clothes from the store downstairs – her room was just one floor above the store – to go to Les Bains Douches,” he wrote to me. “I used to go and look for her and take her back home!” What Alaïa didn’t mention is that he would apparently fix her look before he whisked her away from nocturnal devilry. The search for perfection goes on and on and on…

After spending the day with Alaïa and Campbell on the Vogue shoot, my interview with Azzedine – the last he ever gave – continued by email. And I got the feeling from his longtime right-hand, Caroline Fabre Bazin, that this was probably the best way to communicate. Something he definitely shared with Naomi – a reluctance to be pinned down to a specific timetable. Alaïa famously showed his collections when he felt they were ready. For decades, his acolytes – clients, press, store buyers – would come to Paris specifically for him, with no guarantee that he would actually put anything on the catwalk. So there would be seasons when he would, for instance, recut old styles for Barneys, his biggest American outlet. No one complained. Likewise, about the six years between his most recent couture show, last July, and the previous one or the eight years back to the one before that.

So what was the sway he held over fashion? The elusiveness was definitely fundamental, because it gave credit to such honourable human qualities as loyalty, intelligence, appreciation, self-awareness. For the women he dressed, Alaïa wasn’t about right here, right now. Timelessness is supremely seductive in its intangibility. Here was a designer who developed his aesthetic out of the public eye, getting to intimately know a handful of clients of all ages, shapes and sizes, from the moment he started to make clothes. The first dress he designed, at 15, was for a friend, in tweed, so tight “we had to stand behind her and push her on to the bus”. But, in his original, tiny atelier on Rue de Bellechasse in Paris, he would also make long, man-styled overcoats for Greta Garbo. And right there, between those two extremes, you had the essence of Alaïa: an infinite respect for – and celebration of – womanhood in every form. If he honed his body-conscious craft making costumes for the girls of the Crazy Horse cabaret in the 1970s, he also understood that there were clients like Garbo hungry for a designer who could combine sobriety and eroticism in a way that acknowledged the infinite colours of a woman’s soul.

We’re back in the kitchen. There are two trestle tables set with plates and cutlery. There are many bottles – water and wine – and platters of food, with people tucking in. “A cross between a very nice school and a farmhouse,” as it was described by artist Richard Wentworth, whose huge forensic, photographic analysis of Alaïa’s creative process filled the on-site gallery when I was there. “The nice thing is that I don’t come from fashion, so it was just like having lunch with someone.” I would love to have lunch, but duty calls. The shoot continues. Naomi is bewigged in a black bob which evokes the Meisel shoots of that wondrous Italian Vogue moment when the 1980s turned into the 1990s. There is access to a cavernous room full of archived Alaïa and Naomi is dressing. But Mariacarla Boscono arrives to choose an outfit for the evening’s gala event, and my moment to corral Azzedine and Naomi evaporates in chaos.

But still, it’s a family chaos. Azzedine’s nephew Montassor has been at his side for 17 years. He’s the sprite who keeps the room humming. I watch Naomi and Azzedine together, the same devilish glint in their eyes. “I am very possessive,” he will write later. “Naomi is very possessive, too. And jealous. Because I think that if you love someone, you must be jealous. I love the history of jealousy. If you are not jealous, you don’t love! Like me, she is intuitive, stubborn, quick, generous and honest,” Alaïa continues. “Naomi is an amazing person; nobody truly understands her. She is much deeper than she first appears. She is quite misunderstood.” He insists he would change nothing about her. “We don’t have to ask anyone to change. We should respect everyone’s individuality. Maybe we have to change ourselves to co-operate with others. Perhaps we can learn something about ourselves through the differences of others.”

And there was Alaïa’s thumbnail sketch of himself, on the public record for the last time. Those who knew him best will forever more talk about how compassionate and engaged he was, and tangy with it. The picture that goes with that is him pinning and draping all night long, drinking his vodka, dancing to the music of Oum Kalsoum. And always coming back to the kitchen to cook for his friends.