Hamish Bowles pays tribute to Elbaz, who passed away yesterday at the age of 59.
Remembering Alber Elbaz, Visionary Designer, Generous Spirit, and Friend to All
Alber Elbaz, who succumbed to complications from Covid-19 at the age of 59, leaves a tremendous void in the fashion industry that he illuminated through the decades with his alluring designs and visionary thinking.
Albert Elbaz was born in Casablanca. He was ten when the Elbazes, like many Jewish families in Morocco at the time, left the country. They settled in the industrial city of Holon in Israel. Alber served his compulsory military service in the Israel Defence Forces and subsequently discovered his vocation while studying at the Shenkar College.
Although she might have preferred him to pursue training as a doctor—an idea Alber flirted with—his mother nevertheless recognized his talent and gave him $800 to pursue his fashion dreams in New York (where Alber dropped the soft ‘t’ in Albert so that it would be easier for Americans to pronounce his name correctly). He worked for a bridal manufacturer before joining the studio of Geoffrey Beene in 1989. The prickly but brilliant Louisiana-born designer had a huge impact on the American fashion landscape at the time, influencing a whole generation of emerging young designers, Marc Jacobs and Isaac Mizrahi among them. Mr. Beene (as he was universally known) recognized Alber’s talent, and his protegé’s whimsical touch and powerful creative imagination were very clearly in evidence in the Beene collections in the early 1990s (during the Elbaz years the Beene label included the symbol of a hand-drawn bow). Beene was a hard taskmaster but his workrooms had a technique that was unmatched in the New York ateliers at the time, and Beene had an extraordinary instinct for unusual and innovative combinations of fabric and color, and for sinuous cutting, that Alber quickly absorbed. Thenceforth, Alber would always describe himself first and foremost as “a dressmaker.”
In 1996, Alber moved to Paris as the creative director of Guy Laroche. His first runway show for the brand was not without incident—I remember that many of the pearl necklaces that laced up the high heeled shoes came unraveled so that the girls struggled to walk and the runway was dangerously sprinkled with loose pearl beads. Alber’s appearance at the end of the show, however, with his Charlie Chaplin walk and wave, gave the whole thing an injection of slapstick humour, turning a negative into a positive.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Hamish Bowles
