After the recent men’s Spring 2024 fashion week that closed with Louis Vuitton’s innovative collection led by its first celebrity creative director Pharrell Williams, a new round of Haute Couture shows is slowly rolling out. On July 2, the fashion house Alaïa revealed its latest collection which took the concept of time as a tangible topic to be weaved creatively into the context of fashion.
Through symbols and notions of craftsmanship, designer Pieter Mulier reflected the concept of time into the brand’s collection by focusing on the reinvention of the body’s shape, using different garments that act as timelines of Alaïa’s brand evolution, and highlighting the one key point of buttons.
The body-conscious dresses seem to have staged the main focus of this time’s collection. The silhouettes of the dresses came in from seamless, tight-flowing dresses to hugging leather coats decorated with obsessive details of 35 buttons. Each garment used reflects the craftsmanship’s time and care dedicated to bringing the dress pieces alive and flowing as the models wore them and walked over the footbridge across the Seine. The various silhouettes worked to reinvent the human body and figures.
The choice of fabric and garments that are unique to each piece embodies the timelines of the brand. Marking the refinement of Alaïa’s designs throughout brand history, the collection also echoed some of the archival pieces. Fabric types from leather to gauzy, lacquered knits to alluring latex, the collection also presented a visual and tactile experience that boldly stated a sense of feminism and glorification of the physicality of womanhood.
The attention to obsessive details like buttons worked to reinforce the overarching theme of time. Employed as the decorations on the front of coats, buttons came to symbolize the moment of transformation and new revelations in Alaïa’s future. Buttons represent the essential ritual of dressing and the act of unfastening marks the revelations of new change and reinvention. Alaïa’s future revelation and transformation were implied through this season’s collection which captured the power of feminine dressing with the spotlight on the body’s contours.
