THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF MEMORY
A look at Azzedine Alaïa’s Africa, through the traces of childhood, the body and memory.
Born in Tunisia, Azzedine Alaïa left his country at a young age for Paris, where he built his place in fashion history. He became one of the most singular names in haute couture, perhaps one of the designers who understood the female body best. Yet as you look at the designs in the exhibition curated by Olivier Saillard, ranging from the 1980s to Alaïa’s final collections, you realise that Tunisia — and, in a wider sense, Africa — was never left behind. In his career, Africa is not a theme that surfaces for one season and then vanishes; it is something that keeps returning over the years, changing form each time.
One of the most beautiful of these traces is the mashrabiya of his Tunisian childhood. The geometry of these latticed architectural screens, which let light in while holding the gaze at bay, resurfaces years later in Alaïa’s laces, macramés and openwork cottons. The fabric reveals the body for an instant, then conceals it; it lets the light through but never exposes everything. In a way, this holds the essence of Alaïa’s relationship with the body: to show and to hide, to enfold and to set free. Another childhood memory is far more sensual. Whitewashed walls sprinkled with water in summer to cool the courtyards, that almost blinding whiteness under the sun, and the sudden freshness felt in the midst of the heat… Looking at the white designs in the exhibition, you wonder how all of this could become a garment. Sometimes a designer’s reference is not a shape we see, but a feeling we sense.
Then white gives way to black. Alaïa’s black is never simply black: at times as dense as ink, at times as stiff as leather, at times fluid enough to settle on the body like a second skin. In the designs of the 1983 and 1984 collections, black becomes a surface that both protects the body and turns it into a sculptural form. One senses the dark surfaces of African masks and the depth of charred wood, yet Alaïa never copies them directly. He distils the reference, strips away the excess, and what remains is line, material and body. This was one of the things the exhibition made me think about most: to understand Alaïa’s relationship with Africa, looking for dresses on which we can see “Africa” is, in fact, the wrong place to start.
In the 1988, 1989 and 1990 collections, the relationship becomes more visible. Raffia, twine, cowrie shells, fringes and a palette ranging from sand to deep reds come into play. Yet for all this richness of material, Alaïa’s designs never turn into costume. I feel this most strongly in the long-fringed dresses of 1988. The garment is not complete until the body moves; as the body walks, the fringes sway, the silhouette shifts, and the dress ceases to be a static object. Here, Africa becomes less an image than a rhythm. One of the strongest links in the exhibition comes not from motifs, but from movement.
Egypt, meanwhile, opens another door in Alaïa’s world. Mummification, bandages, pharaohs, queens and the image of Cleopatra merge with the designer’s understanding of the body. The bandage dresses, which emerged from 1985 onwards and later became one of Alaïa’s signatures, are among the most striking examples of this relationship. But here, too, what Alaïa does is not a direct historical quotation. The mummy becomes not a costume, but a construction. The principle of the bandage wrapping the body is taken up to create a contemporary silhouette. The same can be seen in the mashrabiya, in raffia, or in the colours of Africa. Alaïa takes not the image, but the idea behind it, and translates it into his own grammar of fashion.
As I move through the exhibition, I understand more clearly that this is not confined to a handful of collections. In 1992, long striped shirts recalling North African menswear, leopard prints, olive greens, brick and earth tones; later, the return of raffia… The memory of the same land comes back in different forms over more than thirty years. Here we see more clearly that, for Alaïa, colour is never mere ornament either. Colour shapes the body; together with texture, weight and transparency, it becomes part of the silhouette. Africa thus ceases to be a story told on the surface of the garment and becomes a way of thinking about how the garment is built.
Kris Ruhs’s exhibition design deepens this feeling. The garments do not stand before sterile white walls like disconnected museum objects. The painted, weathered surfaces behind them — sand, ochre and earth tones — draw an invisible thread between the collections. When designs from different years are placed side by side, the timeline blurs. After a certain point, I find myself less interested in which piece belongs to which season than in how the same idea resurfaces years later. To me, this is the exhibition’s greatest strength: rather than displaying a designer’s archive, it conducts an archaeology of his memory.
Upstairs, Peter Beard’s photographs give the story another dimension. In 1996, Alaïa travelled with Beard to Kenya, to Maasai land. That he was not someone who travelled much makes the journey all the more special. A small story recounted by Olivier Saillard stays with me long after I leave. Alaïa was struck by the way Maasai men would spend long stretches of time gazing at the sky, and saw in it something extraordinarily noble. It makes me think that, while fashion constantly races towards the future, the new season, the next image, Alaïa perceived time differently. In his world, the past is not something left behind; it is something that waits and, when its time comes, re-emerges in another form.
When I leave the Fondation, no single image of Africa stays with me. On the contrary, a white wall, a shadow, the depth of black, swaying fringes, bandages encircling the body and people gazing at the sky all blend into one another. Perhaps this is precisely why Azzedine Alaïa and Africa is not merely an exhibition about how a designer drew inspiration from Africa. It is, rather, about how a person carries their birthplace, their childhood and the first world they ever saw throughout their life. Alaïa became a Parisian couturier; he entered fashion history as one of the designers who changed the architecture of the body. But the white walls of Tunisia, the light filtering through the mashrabiyas, the blacks, the sands, the shells and the rhythm of Africa were never entirely left behind. He did not repeat them as they were; he transformed them. For him, Africa was not a place to go to, but a memory he kept returning to all his life.