ALAÏA anew

Following the legendary Azzedine Alaïa seemed all but impossible. Then PIETER MULIER came along. NATHAN HELLER meets a designer with an eye for the past and a vision for the future.

- NATHAN HELLER

IN THE MOMENTS BEFORE THE START OF ALAÏA’S READY-TOWEAR SHOW IN PARIS this past summer, the house’s creative director since 2021, Pieter Mulier, stood out among the team for his qualities of ease and calm. He spent some minutes chatting with his backstage visitors. He wandered over to the makeup room, found he wasn’t needed, and sat on a curb with the model Julia Nobis to smoke Marlboro Golds and talk. Shows weren’t always so comfortable—his last one, held within his own apartment, in Antwerp, had driven him into a nervous state—but this one took its rhythm from the summer evening and announced Mulier’s advancement to a master’s station. The runway would be the Passerelle Léopold-Sédar-Senghor, spanning the Seine between the Tuileries and the Musée d’Orsay. This bridge was one of the city’s quiet marvels of engineering, and, as the sun aligned with a western breeze, it exemplified the warm and precise refinement that has given Mulier’s work at Alaïa its magnetic appeal. “I try to keep a little bit of the family aspect of Alaïa in the studio,” Mulier says. “Everything is on a human scale.”