Alaïa Presents Its New Winter-Spring 2024 Collection

Giving time, taking time, less time, timeless. The elastic notion of time has always had a special meaning at the house of Alaia - eschewing its conventions and restrictions, embracing its possibilities. For the Winter-Spring Alaïa collection, Pieter Mulier explores time not as an abstract concept but a material notion - its signs and signifiers, its reflections through fashion. Making time.

The idea of creation, of craft, of fashion as a verb - tracing its etymological origins in facere, to do, to make - can be a measure of time taken, care given. Expanding these notions, the human figure itself can be fashioned, manipulated through the push and pull of clothes, to transform. A heightened bombshell silhouette, tailored to reinforce the shape of the body, bears memories of pasts, and well as proposing a future. It empowers always, time irregardless.

Seams trace not only the form of the body but the life of these clothes, like timelines charting their evolution and refinement, the process behind their invention. They echo archival designs, another time and another life here reconsidered, cherished. Their time is valued.

Buttons are oddly emblematic of time, of process: the ritual of dress, of fastening of oneself into a garment, a time of change and reinvention, a promise of future revelation at their unfastening.

Time is a contemporary fetish. Fabrications reflect a tactility, a sensuality: wool flannel, ostrich, cotton linen, transparent and lacquered knits, leather, latex. They can pretend to be another, demand a moment of closer examination.

On a bridge - between the Maison Alaïa’s origins and its present - figures cross in perpetual motion, their march set against the eternal human backdrop of an ever-ticking clock - the sound of time, yet also the rhythm of life.