Elbaz believes that his creations are a kind of positive to his negative. If he is melancholy and heavy, his clothes are joyful and weightless. It is his job, as he's configured it, to make women feel special, something he does not quite feel entitled to himself. "I do believe a designer has a job that is extremely similar to a concierge's in a good hotel in Manhattan," he said. "At the end of the day, you have to go back to Brooklyn. And
I know Brooklyn is very fancy now, but I mean home. You have to go back to reality. You have to go back to nothing in order to maintain the dream. The moment the dream becomes reality and you start to mingle too much with all these people. . ." He wrinkled his nose to indicate that it was a
Lycra Leggingsbad idea.
Elbaz was born in Morocco. When he was eight months old, his family, like so many other Sephardic Jews at the time, moved to Israel. They settled in Holon, on the Mediterranean coast. Elbaz's father was a hairdresser, and his mother was a painter. She became a cashier to support their four children after her husband died, when Alber (then Albert) was 15. She encouraged her son - who started drawing dresses at the age of seven - and gave him $800 when he left home, in 1985, to come to New York City and pursue a career in fashion.
"I was working in the garment district, making horrible mother-of-the-bride dresses," he said, moving a strawberry around his plate with his fork. "I think for this I leave my home and my family?" He was rescued by Geoffrey Beene, who hired Elbaz as an assistant designer and served as his mentor for seven years. In 1997, Elbaz moved to Paris to become the head designer at Guy Laroche. He did four seasons there and garnered adoring attention from the fashion press, establishing himself as a star in Paris fashion. Then Yves Saint Laurent and his partner, Pierre Berge, recruited him to be the head of ready-to-wear for YSL. Elbaz was in line to be Saint Laurent's successor upon the Maestro's imminent retirement.
But in November 1999, the Group, headed by Domenico De Sole and Tom Ford, bought Yves Saint Laurent. Two months later, after Elbaz had shown just three collections there, he was dismissed, and Ford was installed as head designer. Ford could not have been a more overt and maddening foil. Where Elbaz was pudgy and Jewish and self-doubting, Ford was toned and tanned and Texan. Ford both reflected and shaped the culture of the 90s. But little by little, as the money and the grandiose self-assurance of that era fell away, Ford's sensibility came to seem less
stylish. Ford retired from women's fashion in 2004, largely because of business disputes with the Group's
parent company, PPR. He was going to direct movies, he declared. He also opened a high-end men's store on Madison Avenue, a citadel of materialism with suede-quilted walls and eyeglasses made of 18ct gold. Not long ago
I asked a salesman there about a pair of zentai. "Thirty-four," he said. He meant that they cost $34,000.
In our current moment, Ford - with his tan and his
Latex Catsuitsthat cost as much as a car and his naked-men-on-bearskin-rugs aesthetic - seems distant and comical. Elbaz has gradually won. This is not to say that Elbaz's work is more moderately priced than Ford's. No, the difference is that Elbaz's brand of luxury is more sedate, less ferociously hip than Ford's was. Elbaz detests the idea of an It bag; he thinks that "there is nothing scarier than being 'the designer of the moment', because the moment ends".
When Elbaz designs a collection, or even an individual item, he starts with a "story". For example, a recent collection featured ribbons and was, for him, "like the story of the ties between people, between generations". A new necklace made of resin and faux gems is, in Elbaz's imagination, "a collage of a broken brooch from your grandmother, a pearl from your husband, and something your daughter brought home from kindergarten". It is important to him that everything he makes has this kind of imaginary history, a Genesis myth.
"I do things without decollete; nothing is transparent," Elbaz said. "I am overweight, so I am very, very aware of what to show and what not to show, and I am sure there is a huge link with being an overweight designer and the work I do. My
fantasy is to be skinny, you see? I bring that fantasy into the lightness - I take off the corset and bring comfort and all these things I don't have. What I bring is everything that I don't have. This is the fantasy. This is the concierge that goes home."
Elbaz assumed his post after Shaw-Lan Wang, a Chinese publishing magnate who bought a controlling interest in Lanvin in 2001, requested that he "please wake the sleeping beauty". She wanted him to take up the mantle of Jeanne Lanvin and make the company a player in the luxury market - as it had been at the beginning of the last century. "When I met Alber, I felt he is talented," Wang told me. "In 10 minutes, we decided to work together."
