This is a good day to wish that the world was a little bit more Alber Elbaz.
More full, that is, of the joie de vivre, wit, intuition, empathy, and spontaneous flair that Elbaz brought to fashion. The kind of thinking he applied to how women are living. The discussion behind it. How he just wanted to make complicated things easy and delightful.
It’s five years today since Elbaz tragically died of Covid 19 in the American Hospital in Paris. Half a decade is a long time, but the relevance of his approach is still on point for now. His clothes are still alive in closets, being worn as favorite fail-safes for evening. They’re in museums and archives, and being purloined by daughters and granddaughters.
Daniel Roseberry was remembering Alber’s qualities backstage in conversation with Nicole Phelps before the Schiaparelli ready-to-wear show in March. He was thinking about the impression he made on him in the Noughties: “His love of women was so storied,” he said. Alber’s sculptural single seam dresses had leapt into Roseberry’s mind as he was designing that collection. But more generally, it was the attention and the skill that flowed from Alber’s studio and the atelier and onto the Lanvin runway during the 14 years he spent at the house.
