Wang A Chinese Publishing Magnate
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,
spider man costume 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 zentai that 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
costume spiderman 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." Jeanne Lanvin, the oldest of 11 children, was born in 1867, 16 years before Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel, who came to be seen as the iconic New Woman of the 20th century. Set next to Coco Chanel, "Lanvin represents an equally compelling, if less lurid, example of the self-made professional, a woman creative and entrepreneurial in equal measure," Harold Koda, the curator-in-charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has written. Both Lanvin and Chanel began their careers as milliners in Paris. In 1883, Lanvin went to work at the august Maison Felix. She left for a five-year apprenticeship in Barcelona, with a dressmaker who made clothing for children as well as adults. With the money she made in Spain, Lanvin started her own millinery in 1895, when she returned home to Paris. In 1896, she married and, a year later, she had a daughter, Marguerite Marie-Blanche, who became her muse. Like Elbaz, Lanvin sought to design fashion that could be worn by women throughout their lives. "The intention of these calculated creations was to assist in blurring the line between generations as waistlines, hemlines and necklines rose and fell from season to season," Dean L Merceron writes in the book Lanvin . The company's
zentai logo is a picture of a mother and child, based on a 1907 photograph of Lanvin with her daughter. At first, Elbaz was put off by this image because he felt "there was something religious about it", a vague insinuation of a Madonna and Child. But it grew on him. And it seems an appropriate emblem for Elbaz's work, too - the tenderness of it, the historicity and the modesty. Elbaz is fond of saying that he is not interested in designing the dress that will make a man fall in love with the woman who wears it. He is interested in designing the dress that a woman wears when she falls in love herself. In the midst of the January couture shows in Paris, Elbaz invited three small groups of editors and journalists to a
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