Azzedine Alaia Arthur Elgort

In the 1970s, despite not yet knowing each other, Azzedine Alaia and Arthur Elgort were about to go down the same path. The former realised that fashion had changed. It was now no longer so much in the salons that fashion had to be appreciated but in the street. The latter, Arthur Elgort, then a young photographer for the English edition of Vogue, was in the process of establishing a new vision of photography. His Snapshots would soon define a lighter, more informal photographic style of great spontaneity.

At the same time as the fashion designer was seeing his feminine ideal embodied in the street and worn by an ever-increasing number of clients, the photographer was leaving the studio, opening the windows, and taking over movement and cities as a natural and new setting. Both actively contributed to renewing the representation of the now assertive, determined and independent woman. An exhibition and a book look back on this long collaboration between Alaia and Elgort. Some photographs, which have become timeless classics and are essential to the creation of a fashion designer’s iconography as a secret art, go to form a unique exhibition in Paris. The show provides a fitting tribute to the photography and fashion of which Alaia and Elgort orchestrated the revival.