Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Azzedine Alaïa" in English language version.
[Alaïa] went on to influence the cut of the clothes of his friends Claude Montana and Thierry Mugler. Then he began making clothes under his own name. The key to the work of all three is the slender skirt curved and seamed to outline the contours of the hips.
It was a pair of gloves – black kid wrist-length gauntlets with the cuffs completely studded with silver grommets – that pushed Azzedine into his present success. Chic Parisians snapped them up and wore them tucked into their belts or into their pockets.
Alaia…believes that gloves lend themselves to infinite mysteries: 'Just the gesture of pulling off a glove, or carrying gloves or putting them on the table in front of you – gloves have such personality'.
September 8, 1982: Azzedine Alaïa's body-conscious leather looks arrive at Bergdorf Goodman.
...[T]he Palladium opened on 14th Street...[T]he Azzedine Alaia uniforms for the...waitresses...have black jersey minidresses with tank tops...
He has never presented his work…in circus tents filled with thousands of people. Every season, four times a day for a week, he has given a silent presentation of a small group of clothes – about 80 models these days – for women who buy from him directly, for his shop-owner customers, whose number has grown to 200 worldwide, and for interested journalists.
...Azzedine Alaia's body-hugging fall line is selling out in stores. His hot haute clothes are being copied and worn at every level of fashion.
Azzedine Alaia, just back from New York and his first fashion show, claims he won't have a Paris show for spring. 'I'm still recovering from my New York experience,' he says...
[Alaïa'a] cut…still shows his enduring love of sculpted lines...
Mr. Alaia is…known for his sexy suits, for cutting his jackets and skirts to provide curves on even the most angular bodies....He…used intricate seaming on the skirts and pants to create the illusion of a tight fit even when the clothes did not cling
...[T]he stars are his leather suits.
Alaia's greatest achievement…has been in knitwear. Here he has applied the draping techniques, the molding of shoulders and armholes that he applied in cloth, and manages to get it all manufactured.
…Azzedine is emphasizing the proportions of a broad-shouldered, long slim jacket over a narrow skirt.
…[T]he tops of [Alaia's] bodies were broad.
Azzedine Alaïa's sexy contoured skirts...with broad-shouldered jackets...show off a good figure.
Alaia is said to be the designer who makes the sexiest clothes in the business….[L]ots of his designs are very tight-fitting, and he does like zippers that open onto fleshy, peekaboo mousseline and other provocations of that order.
...[I]n New York, Paris and London, the peplum jacket is very much back in style....The version most often seen in Paris is Azzedine Alaia's, with a flaring cut that creates a petal-like effect.
...Alaia, while remaining a master of cut and form, keeps evolving and expanding his scope.
Fashion has changed its course, from free‐flowing and easy to structured and contrived....Instead of evolving naturally from the kinds of clothes women have been wearing, the spring styles have skipped back over several decades of fashion. They've landed somewhere in the middle of the 1940's, carrying obsolete notions of glamour, sophistication and hard‐edged chic as excess baggage....In many cases, the ease that had made clothes so comfortable was eliminated....[S]houlder pads...added another element of restraint. Linings and stiffer constructions began to reappear....The results have been called sexy by admirers; detractors call the clothes tawdry. Were designers so carried away by one of fashion's golden ages that they simply didn't notice how women had changed? Did they simply run out of ideas? They have succeeded in evoking an epoch in which many women, perhaps the majority, were delighted to dress as sex objects.
[In the early 1970's,] [t]he young wore blue jeans and shirts with no bras, and women seeking to express their individuality wore pants. It was the beginning of the great sportswear era. What women wanted and bought were separate items — sweaters, shirts, jackets — to put together themselves as they saw fit.
[T]he 1970's will be marked by clothes divided into many easy pieces that can be added to or subtracted from, according to the weather, personal preferences and the feeling of the moment.... Construction will continue to be simplified so that clothes become increasingly less bulky and more flowing. The style of the 1970's is low on artifice, high on a natural look. Casual is the operative word.
In the 1970's...[s]portswear emerged as the dominant theme, implying a relaxed fit and considerable versatility, since most clothes were made in interchangeable parts....For a number of years, it offered a serviceable way of dressing, geared to active women's lives, adjusting to vagaries of climate, adapting easily to travel requirements. As the sportswear onslaught continued, clothes lost their linings and interfacings, becoming softer, looser, less structured. Almost everything became as comfortable to wear as a sweater.
[Azzedine Alaïa, Claude Montana, Thierry Mugler, Jean-Paul Gaultier, i]n these designers' collections, waistlines are usually taut, heels are high,...and, while the designers generally deny it, many of the clothes are restrictive.
..[H]ow explain the resurgence of short, tight skirts, body-cupping knitted dresses, spindly heels and other constricting clothes that can only be described as sexist? Favored by a small fashion-oriented cult in Paris, the styles by such designers as Azzedine Alaia, Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana...run counter to the flowing, unrestricted...look, and many women find them offensive.
Some...denounce it as a negation of all the strides made by women in the last 20 years and a mark of the return to their sex-object status.
'Men turn their heads when you wear his clothes,' says Mathilde de Rothschild, 'That's not so bad'.
'I respect the body,' Azzedine says, 'Even a rounded woman looks good in my clothes'.
Dawn Mello, the executive vice president and director of fashion merchandising at Bergdorf Goodman,…explains: '…There is a whole generation of young women who have never worn fitted clothes. Azzedine's are fitted, but they are in no way retrospective – a throwback to the 1940's or 50's – they are thoroughly modern'.
...Alaïa won two French fashion 'Oscars' in 1985, surrounded by a bevy of supermodels in his mummy-inspired bandage dress...
Alaia's clothes broke all the store's records for sales by a new designer.
...[T]he first public fashion show by this Tunisian-born Paris designer, held at the Palladium in New York..., [was] the town's hottest ticket in years[: o]ver 10,000 requests for the 1,500 places at the show, 900 of them standing room [only]...
Azzedine Alaïa['s]...carefully carved-out dresses and skirts...fitted so close to the body that there's barely enough room for underwear underneath...[Alaïa's] thin jersey dress...seemed glued onto [the model's] body.
The designer who started the fashion world's fit over fit, Azzedine Alaia...
...Azzedine Alaia aficionados wear leather dresses, skirts and coats. (Alaia makes the sexiest leathers...)...
...[M]any of the dresses, sweaters and coats are constructed with broad shoulders...
Azzedine Alaïa['s]...dresses and skirts...have been a major influence on many other designers this season.
Alaia is the most copied designer in Paris, his work influencing even the most famous names.
...Azzedine Alaia...has some new viscose knit dresses for spring that are well on their way to becoming the choicest bondage clothes of the year. They lace up the side of the body in a kind of latticed openwork that bares just the right amount of skin in just the right places.
[Claude Montana] says that, in a way, he is designing for the woman who doesn't exist anymore. 'That woman doesn't care about comfort, just about her look,' he says. 'It is the woman of Hollywood in the '40s. Today, everyone in the movies wants to look like the girl next door . . . I would love to have designed for the Hollywood of yesterday'.
'What has been appearing on stage has nothing to do with women today,' said a very distressed Koko Hashim of John Wanamaker's in Philadelphia...'Customers will be so turned off by the pictures they see they will retreat happily back to their blazers. And that is not good for business.'
Others say [Alaïa's] super-fitted clothes, sculpted at the midriff and over the derrière, embody the worst in fashion's newest look: a swerve back to sexy and provocative dress, surely inappropriate for the modern woman.
Alaïa's...dresses show every dimple, every vein, every corpuscle.
Alaia used a Size 14 model in his show, as well as a pregnant model -- obviously to answer critics who insist his clothes are only for the superskinny. Admittedly, neither model wore the designer's close-to-the-body knit dresses with intriguing seams, but rather his easy, belted coats.
Mugler's earlier signature [science fiction-like, goddess women in fitted clothes]…formed when he and Azzedine Alaia collaborated at the Mugler design house.
Azzedine Alaïa again delayed his show for a month after the Paris fashion week.
Azzedine Alaïa's fall/winter success so preoccupied his workrooms that he was unable to present a full spring collection.
Azzedine cut a complex structure that let both his woven and stretch cloths fit like custom-made slipcovers, allowing the stretch properties to hug but not squeeze and flatten the body.
Alaïa['s]...designs...follow and define the wearer's torso with structural welt seaming."
...[S]ophisticated stretch fabrics...shape [Alaïa's] knitwear. Newest for fall, tights that start out in solid knit and turn into openwork stockings at the thigh.
Azzedine moulds the waistline…by cinching the waist in a corselet.
Azzedine Alaia's…spring collection…puts a dramatic spotlight on an uplifted wired bra.
Azzedine Alaia continues to…have an impact on the international fashion scene out of all proportion to the size of his collections.
It was a season that saw many major designers in Paris shamelessly copy from the hourglass silhouette of Azzedine Alaia.
At Mugler, several of the suede jackets echoed the asymmetric rippling peplums of Alaia's fall [1985] success.
His...designs...are the pinnacle of our epoch...
Alaïa and Gaultier[s]...critics often assailed them for what they perceived to be provocative sex clothes.
