At fashion's high table, a strong lipstick is never “just” a strong lipstick.
It is scrutinised and emoted over, the way scholars pore over the Talmud for
hitherto undetected meaning. So, strong lipstick can be too orange, too
blue, too hot, too cold. At Lanvin's most recent show, it was too black. The
night before the show it gave Alber Elbaz, Lanvin's 47-year-old Israeli head
designer and, for many, the man behind the most desirable clothes of our
time, a headache. In the end he had no choice but to tell Pat McGrath, the
venerated make-up artist working on the show, that it was erasing the
models' personalities. Together they reconsidered the options and eventually
plumped for a less aggressive cherry red. Was this subliminal, given that
red lipstick remains the badge of defiance, an emblem of hope, a dignified
gesture of self-esteem when all around is going very badly to pot?
Elbaz isn't sure: “But they say in a recession that the one thing that doesn't
go down is red lipstick.” Not that baldly commercial imperatives sway him.
He used red because there have been many mornings, since the sunny,
colourful collection that he designed more than a year ago (the one in all
the magazines now, coveted by every woman conversant with modern clothes),
when he woke up, switched on the news about Gaza or another failing bank and
thought, Who Needs Fashion? “But, you know, it's almost like that moment
when someone is told they have a disease. Either you say, OK, let me die
now, or you say, I'm going to buy a beautiful dress, I'm going to go forward
and I'm going to go back to lipstick. And do you know what? A good shoe or a
good dress does something to you. It's not just about fashion victims. It
really does do something for all women.”
Eccentric as this might seem to those not embalmed in fashion fluid, he is on
to something. In The Thoughtful Dresser, Linda Grant's new book about
clothes, she recounts the almost life-saving effects on female inmates of a
consignment of red lipstick mysteriously delivered the to Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp shortly after the British Red Cross arrived in 1945.
One might assume it to be axiomatic that all designers would be working their
socks off right now to uplift and soothe. But some designers work in
mysterious, contrary ways. Elbaz, however, always wants to make women
beautiful - and he invariably succeeds. There's a precision and poetry to
his clothes that is at once elegant and slightly undone, so that women look
not just beautiful but interesting - not in a crazy, introspective way, but
in ways that appeal to other women, with their eye for specific details, and
to men, with their eye for the overall picture.
This is key, for Elbaz believes that the time of women dressing for other
women may, for the moment, have passed and he's happy “because ultimately
that kind of dressing is about making other women jealous”. For this year's
Oscars ceremony, he put Tilda Swinton in a black bias-cut skirt and fawn
chiffon blouse - for many style-watchers, the ensemble of the evening, if
not the entire awards season, and the antithesis of everything that has
become bland and crass in fashion. He chose it because he could imagine her
lounging in it at home as well as gliding down the red carpet “and because I
couldn't bear to see another corseted strapless gown in lilac or pale blue”.
The latest collection, recently shown in Paris, mainly black (“and you know I
don't usually do black”) and strict in its outlines, was cut on the bias:
“Not just the dresses - that would be easy, but everything. We had a million
trials, and bias cutting uses a lot of fabric in the first place.Then we put
all the stitching, all the features on the outside - no façade, nothing is
being hidden. All the seams were out, and we brought the front to the back,
and when the models put them on suddenly they looked as though the clothes
were hugging them.”
They did, too. When the last models appeared in austere but lovely, front to
back, bias-cut suits and dresses with lavish embellishment, they looked like
women putting on a brave face and keeping what's left of their investment
portfolios close by in case of sudden meltdown. Oddly, they seemed almost
noble, like glamorous Second World War heroines - an effect greatly
amplified by that lipstick.
This is not fashion that is easy to replicate on the high street, although
that doesn't stop the high street trying. It's not even fashion that's easy
to replicate on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where you'll find Elbaz's office,
the Lanvin ateliers and the men's and women's stores with their cache of
expensive, even by designer label standards, treasures.
His most recent challenge, for instance, was a luscious fabric that worked out
at €76 (£70) a metre. What with the bias cutting wastage, this comes out
pricey by anyone's measure. So Elbaz bartered: “I said to the fabric agent,
I can order enough for one dress that will get photographed everywhere but
which no one will buy, which means no orders for you. Or you can do me a
deal so that I can afford to buy more and produce them at a price where
women will buy them.” They cut him a deal; there will be around 1,000 women
wearing that Lanvin fabric. He begins with a romantic story, lovingly worked
into the cloth - but the clothes, in the end, speak for themselves. It is
this mixture of the poetic and the pragmatic that makes Elbaz special and
has the ladies who sweep in and out of Lanvin's stores eating out of his
hands, especially as he is known to pop down to the shopfloor and advise
from time to time.
For these rare talents he must in part thank his upbringing in a small town
just south of Tel Aviv in a country that in the Sixties was not overly
burdened by elegant dressing. The family, Sephardic Jews, came from Morocco.
His father was a hairdresser, his mother a painter who worked as a cashier
to help to raise their four children. Unlike many designers, he lays no
great claims to her swanning about in Dior or being some kind of campy muse.
She was, however, a major influence and her death last year is a loss from
which he is only beginning to recover.
The thing is, she kept him grounded. When he telephoned her from New York,
where he first worked making “horrible” wedding dresses and then for the
legendarily exacting designer Geoffrey Beene, or from Paris, she would tell
him to call back when he was in a country where he would behave like her son
and not some megalomaniac fashion person. In short, she provided a haven,
even when she was demanding: not long before she died she asked that her
son, the man whose £1,000 dresses have women queueing up at Bergdorf
Goodman's and Harvey Nichols, run her and her friends up skirts in their
sizes.
Albaz needs a haven because angst is his middle name. He agonises about
everything - reviews, even though he rarely gets a dud one; his weight, even
though he thinks his size is responsible both for his desire to dress not
just sticks and to make clothes that are weightless; about the new Lanvin
store that opens this week in Central London. “The planning restrictions
were something else. You can't touch anything, which is like someone giving
you an apartment and then refusing to hand over the keys.” Of course, the
shop is gorgeous, a medley of crystal chandeliers and mirrors “and located
between a butcher and hairdresser - what more do you need in life?”
High on the worry agenda is the thorny subject of holidays, because even
though he's meant to fly to Israel on the evening of our interview with his
partner Alex Koo, Lanvin's director of merchandising: “Something always goes
wrong. I twist my ankle, hurt my back, find a stone in my kidneys, or maybe
I see a review.”
He doesn't know why he's so anxious, but the humiliating nature of his
departure from Yves Saint Laurent in 2000 - he was the first designer after
Saint Laurent - can't have helped. In 1999, Tom Ford, then at Gucci, bought
YSL and, shortly after, installed himself as creative director. Suffice to
say that if Tom Ford's glamorous take on the fashion designer as part
jet-set celebrity, part omnipotent auteur was the perfect synecdoche for the
Nineties, then Elbaz's low-key, touchy-feely, highly personalised approach
is spot on for now.
It is hard to imagine him actually getting round to boarding any aircraft, let
alone a private jet. And while we are today eating a fancy seafood lunch in
the Hôtel de Crillonin Paris, he confides that what he really wanted to do
was telephone me before I arrived to suggest a sandwich in the park, “A big
sandwich.” He surveys the dainty seascape on his plate balefully. “Always
the same,” he sighs. “Diet every day, then I get home at night. And eat.”
Although Lanvin remains a smaller company than its profile suggests - partly
because of its creative director's lack of enthusiasm for churning out
formulaic accessories and licences - its vision resonates with how women
aspire to look. And Elbaz doesn't have a desire to have his own name over
the door. There's a maturity and a sensitivity to the way he designs that
has more to do with the good manners of wanting to look your best rather
than the blingy exuberance of the recent past. In an era when even luxury
has been mass manufactured, there remains something emotionally charged
about these clothes. “Maybe it's my fantasy of how I would like to look,” he
suggests.
But it's more than fantasy. He empathises with the feeling that comes from
wearing something that makes a woman feel chic and comfortable, slimmer but
able to breath and eat. “I start with a man's view and I switch to how it
will feel, and see myself experiencing the clothes, not like a transvestite,
although I love transvestites.” Maybe if he lost weight, some of that
empathy might dissipate. The thought prompts more angst. Angst has its
upsides though. It is, he notes, the price of creativity. In which case, I
suggest, doesn't he ever wish that his angst was expended on something
bigger? “Know your limitations,” he replies. With that, he says he has to
get back to help dress the shop window on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. A
likely story, I think. So I amble past 20 minutes later and there he is in
the window, pins in hand, narrative at the ready.
Lanvin, 128 Mount Street, London, W1
