“Humble’s Gift,” a profile of Alber Elbaz by Sally Singer with portrait by Irving Penn, was originally published in the March 2005 issue of Vogue. It is republished here in memory of the designer, who died on Saturday in Paris.
How did Alber Elbaz transform the house of Lanvin into the fashion world’s most-wanted label? By proving, Sally Singer writes, that vulnerability and modesty are not antithetical to chic. This season, warm is the new cool.
A typical Alber Elbaz story—which the 43-year-old designer for Lanvin is as likely as anybody to tell—casts him in the role of the outsider who cannot quite believe that the velvet rope has been raised to admit him to the party. At a very exclusive bash thrown by Karl Lagerfeld last October to celebrate Nicole Kidman’s Chanel No 5 campaign, Elbaz tried vainly to muster the courage to introduce himself to the guest of honor, whom he knew to be a fan of his work. Fleeing into the night—of course it was pouring, and there was no sign of a taxi—he felt utterly defeated by his inability to play the game. The next morning, in his office above the Lanvin boutique on the Rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré, his phone rang: Mlle Kidman was en bas, shopping. Elbaz went downstairs, introduced himself, and started fitting her.
This is the Elbaz struggle: how to overcome his inclination to absent himself, for philosophical and perhaps self-conscious reasons—“You know how people have pictures of themselves over the years where they look fatter or thinner? I don’t have a single picture of myself where I look good,” he said with a grin over dinner at Chez Georges, his local eatery in Paris—from the brouhaha of the fashion world. “Fashion is not a reality, but it can become a reality if there’s nothing else in your life,” he says. But the brouhaha that Elbaz has brought to Lanvin is real. No label is more loved and sought after by the best dressed in Hollywood: Gwyneth, Nicole, Sarah Jessica, Charlize, Chloë, Sofia C.... And here’s the kicker: They’re real customers. Among the growing list of accomplishments of Alber Elbaz is that he has, completely by accident, forced stars to actually shop. This is because (a) Lanvin and Elbaz are not in a position, temperamentally or economically, to compete with the wooing, begging, and gifting of the other major fashion houses; and (b) any self-respecting style icon today goes crazy at the thought of not having an ineffably wearable and absolutely chic Lanvin trench coat, say, or strands of grosgrain- or tulle-covered Lanvin pearls to wear over her cashmere sweater/shirt with detachable collar and cuffs. (Or a Lanvin dress incorporating a galaxy of jewels nestling beneath the collarbone. A postnatal Kate Moss looked out-of-this-world in one of these at the opening of the V&A’s Manolo Blahnik exhibit two years ago; when a friend called Elbaz that night with the news, he was stunned that she might own something of his.)
Lanvin’s Paris boutique—and Elbaz’s small corner of Dover Street Market in London, Rei Kawakubo’s designer emporium where a few special pieces are sold—has quite unexpectedly become a mecca for the discerning. Sarah Jessica Parker tells the story of being in Paris to shoot those final Baryshnikov moments for Sex and the City and for a closing fete. “On the Saturday,” she remembers, “we had a later call. I went to get a present for Matthew”—her husband, Matthew Broderick—“at Hermès. The clock was ticking. When I saw that Lanvin was across the street, I ran over there. I didn’t have a dress for the party. I saw I don’t know how many things that I loved. There was this funny man in the store, really flamboyant, really colorful. It was like something out of a script. He said, ’Alber’s upstairs.’ I said, ’Don’t bother him.’ ” But Elbaz came down and started reworking a dress for her. (“He would be lost if he didn’t have direct contact with the people who wear his clothes,” says Adrian Joffe of Comme des Garçons and Dover Street Market.) When Parker received it later that day at the Plaza Athénée, the garment bag was covered with beautiful drawings he’d made with a magic marker. Moral? She wore the dress she’d bought, not the dresses sent to her by other houses.
That Alber Elbaz should be the creator of spring 2005’s most revered and must-have collection—with its billowing gazar skirts, Fortuny gowns, jeweled blousons, floaty suiting, ballet flats, and frayed-ribbon necklaces—is a sign of the dramatic transformation come upon us in the fashion and luxury world. For the best part of a decade, the business was about stimulating paroxysms of shopping lust (for the It bag or It shoe of the season) and offering, through the acquisition of a few key and cool items, access to a glamorous and dictatorial elite of the fabulous and the hot and the faintly wicked. Elbaz is the antithesis of all that; although he is not anti-Tom Ford (the man who dismissed and succeeded him at Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche), he is the anti-Ford. This is not a matter of mere personality or coolness; it is intrinsic to the designs. To wear Lanvin is to feel, in the words of Sofia Coppola, “dressed up but not making a big statement... womanly and sophisticated,” as opposed to sexy and theatrical. “I always wonder why people have to be sexy,” Elbaz mused to a trunk-show audience at Barneys in November.
“I like that they have a timeless quality—the thick zipper, the frayed hem,” says the actress Chloë Sevigny, who has championed Elbaz through thick and thin. “They’re very elegant, very classy, very ladylike. It will stand the test of time more than any other collection right now. You could wear it today or in 60 years, whereas with Prada, for example, you will always be able to identify any piece with a collection.” Julie Gilhart, the fashion director at Barneys, says, “We’ve been so hyped-out in the last few years. And hype is fun, hype is energy. But now it’s about the clothes. It’s about how women feel in the clothes. And at this point, Alber tries to connect with the customer more than any other designer.” Elbaz put it this way to clients at the trunk show: “I found a home. I found Lanvin. The logo of that house is a mother and a daughter—not a horse, not a car. The world is changing. Women are changing.”
The great thing about Elbaz, however, is his steadfastness. His fellow Israeli and old friend the artist Izhar Patkin says, “Alber is always Alber. How humble he is, how charming he is. He is very steady and very true to himself. He never was blinded by his success. My God, he’s been through a lot. Somebody else’s head would have turned.”
Elbaz grew up in a Moroccan-Israeli family outside Tel Aviv, the youngest of four. After military service—too sickly to see much action, he busied himself with arranging arts-and-culture programs for the aged—he studied fashion design at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design (his teacher, Tamara Yovel-Jones, proudly says, “We always knew he would arrive in a top position”). He came to New York with $800 given to him by his mother, with whom he remains very close; when he’s sick, it’s she who tells him “Rice and potatoes,” and he obeys. He struggled to find the right job, and, finally, with the help of two VOGUE editors, landed a position with Geoffrey Beene. Kim Hastreiter, the editor of Paper magazine, recalls, “Mr. Beene could be very difficult with the people who worked in his studio, but he adored Alber. Alber always spoke his mind; he was, well, like, a Jew”—Hastreiter laughs—“and Mr. Beene loved loudmouthed Jews like Alber and myself.” Beene really loved him, as Hastreiter points out, because Elbaz from the start had “the touch.” He shared Beene’s passion for problem-solving and conceptual purity—can a dress be made with one seam? How about no seams? Or a 25-foot zipper?—plus, crucially, he could make it lovely.
This is what led, after seven years with Mr. Beene, to Elbaz’s appointment as creative director of Guy Laroche in Paris. He was a success—even Elbaz admits that his glossy tweeds and mohair pieces were triumphs—and the small scale of the place, where an advertising campaign could be created with a Xerox machine, appealed to him. “I was very free there. It was such a hard moment when I left there.” After only three shows, Pierre Bergé offered this newcomer, who barely spoke French, the dream position of succeeding Mr. Saint Laurent as designer of the house’s ready-to-wear. But it’s tough to live one’s dream, especially if, like Elbaz, one is “such a worrier. Whenever something good happens I worry that disaster will strike.” His first collection—which envisioned a Saint Laurent woman as a creature of “nervous glamour” in a big floppy hat, bangles, and trouser suits—was criticized by the fashion establishment as being overly deferential to the master. “I felt like the son-in-law in that house,” Elbaz admits. “I got into a family, a royal family, and I had to perform. Everything I did I questioned myself: Is it too Saint Laurent or not enough Saint Laurent? That is wrong in design. It should be fluid. Everything was so frightening to me. I felt so worried, so embarrassed, so bad for myself and my team. The second collection was all about waterproof. I felt so unprotected. All the colors were the colors of poison—green, blue, turquoise, purple.”
“When he started at Saint Laurent,” Chloë Sevigny says, “perhaps the fashion world wasn’t embracing him because he wasn’t as handsome or suave as Tom Ford.” But, ironically, it was Sevigny and other cool girls like Tara Subkoff and Sarah Jessica Parker and Marina Rust who got it, and bought it, right from the first collection.
After a year and two collections, the house of Yves Saint Laurent was sold to Domenico de Sole’s Gucci group. Elbaz put out one more collection, and then it was game over. “Nobody had to tell me anything,” he says of his termination. “I just had to open every magazine in the world. I had to leave Paris. I was so embarrassed, not for what I had done—I tried to update it for a new generation, I didn’t want to make a French Prada—but because everyone knew. I was ashamed.” Elbaz remains genuinely respectful of Tom Ford, his successor: “He was the first American designer to take over Europe. He was the pioneer. He made it possible for people like me. He took an old house and dusted it off.”
After YSL, Elbaz had the time and means to take a year to simply “travel and dream.” He went to India and to the Far East, as always visiting orphanages and old-folks’ homes whenever he could: That is Elbaz’s idea of joy. When the opening came up at Lanvin—France’s oldest couture house, which always retained a whiff of the woman who founded and ran it for so long—he was able to see that this was the house amenable to his ways of thinking. “Lanvin has a great heritage, but I can give it different direction. That isn’t the same at YSL or Hermès. I’m not scared of these archives, as I was in the past.” And, as at Laroche, the size of the business felt right for him. It is a shoestring operation. Elbaz and his design team can fit the collection and make and install the Christmas windows in a day. Says Alexandre de Betak, who produces Lanvin’s catwalk shows, “Even if we suddenly had ten or a hundred times more in the budget than we do have, we probably would still be as light-handed. Alber knows that he needs humility and difficulties to work well. He’s like a good film director who realizes he shouldn’t go to Hollywood. He’s better as an independent.” Ralph Toledano, the CEO of Chloé who years ago hired Elbaz for Guy Laroche, puts it this way: “Alber needs a family atmosphere. When we worked together we were like brothers. He needs to be loved.”
Elbaz has now put out six stellar collections for Lanvin. “The emotional weight he brings to his designs makes it so unique,” Patkin says. “When I saw the tweed coat with the tulle envelope he did last season, I said, ’My God, it’s all about a dream, about a cloud.’ And he said, ’That’s what I was doing.’ ” Unlike Elbaz, who refuses to be drawn out on the politics of his homeland, Patkin makes the following connection: “In Israel, there is constantly the question of humanity at stake—whether we are mistreating people, whether we are being mistreated—and this is why his clothes are always so wearable and so loving. They are always a step short of theatricality. With the same vocabulary, a designer could do something theatrical; he does something emotional.”
For the latest collection, Elbaz was inspired by Agathe Rouff, an otherworldly Parisian beauty and mother of two. Rouff, who is 32 and formerly the youngest client of Yves Saint Laurent Couture, is possessed of a visual and intellectual sensibility of a kind that designers in need of a muse dream of. It was Rouff who, over lunch last spring, tipped off Elbaz to the simplicity and modernity of Fortuny, which led to Elbaz’s producing the season’s most luscious evening dresses. Rouff is his ideal woman: smart, maternal, internal, and uninterested in the glitzy shenanigans of society. “I don’t know why we talked about Fortuny,” she said. “We talk about literature, we talk about feelings. We don’t really talk about fashion; we talk about life.” But therein lies the magic of Lanvin: the elevation of vulnerability and pride, reversals of fortune and quiet triumphs, all that clutters our existence into something beautiful.
On a cold November day last year, Alber Elbaz found himself being photographed by Irving Penn. It was too much for him. Tears welled up in his eyes. “You’re working all your life for this moment,” he said. “It took 23 years to get into a room of four by five meters where there’s only a man and a camera.” Afterward, he went to Bed Bath & Beyond for a sandwich. (“I liked it. It was full of people who were working and not working, eating fattening and not fattening foods.”) Then he went uptown to visit the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum. Quite by chance, he came upon racks of Geoffrey Beene’s archives, which the late designer had donated before his death. For the second time that day, Elbaz began to cry. He held out a black jersey and point d’esprit evening gown. “This is my life,” he said.