It’s easy to see why Pieter Mulier has suddenly become the name on everyone’s lips amidst the industry’s great game of creative musical chairs.
He’s quickly heated up Alaïa to the boiling point; turned out some of the hottest shoes and bags of the last few years – his bedazzled or mesh ballet flats and Le Teckel and Le Click bags, for example – and, according to market sources, catapulted the revenues of the Richemont-owned house by an impressive multiple.
He’s also creating some of the most original, inventive and dazzling clothes in Paris, having challenged himself to work with a single yarn, without typical closures like buttons or zippers, and opting to show collections outside the fashion system, as founder Azzedine Alaïa always did.
This season marked Alaïa’s first time on the official ready-to-wear calendar, albeit with its oddball seasonal nomenclature, summer-fall, and with Mulier in an experimental mood.
Fabric donuts were the main feature of this daring collection: framing faces, ringing shoulders, and hugging hips like lifebuoys, from which fell the most seductive skirts imaginable.
There were a host of new silhouettes, some tiered and pointy, others tubular, but most of them voluptuous and padded, including commanding leather coats with pool-noodle thick lapels.
Mulier made giant, figurative bronze busts by artist Mark Manders the main props at his show, signaling his sculptural approach, and a wish to celebrate various cultures and eras, lauding Manders’ work as “reminiscent at once of many different cultures.”
You could feel North Africa and Elizabethan royals embedded in Mulier’s designs, but with the references blurred like his soundtrack, which had electronic throb sliding up against yearning vocals in Arabic.
“The idea of codes of beauty outside of any era or geography, free of boundaries, is innately keyed to the philosophy of Alaïa, our identity,” Mulier said in a letter shared right after the show.
His models held their heads high and their arms folded, as if posing for a painted portrait. The whole spectacle seduced with all the smooth or furry sculpted shapes, and the seductive swish and sway of those donut-topped skirts spilling burgundy ropes, butter-colored pleats or sparkling chenille.
Mixed in were handsome wool coats with roped shoulders and dramatic face-framing, or face-hiding, lapels; sleek, cutaway bolero jackets, and shearling vests with an ’80s zest.
Gwendoline Christie, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Liya Kebede and Pierpaolo Piccioli were among the VIPs crowded on black metal benches lined up in what is usually Alaïa’s atelier, and they let out a cheer when Mulier, fashion’s new lord of the rings, bounded out for a bow.
