Yellow Grosgrain

Very little is painless or undramatic for Elbaz

Jeanne Lanvin was known for elaborate ornamentation-beadwork, embroidery, and intricate overlays of tulle or metallic netting-and Elbaz retains some of his predecessor’s affection for lavish embellishment. The models were heaped with jewelry and shining in sequins and bias-cut lamé. Elbaz’s best friend, Joel Arthur Rosenthal, a Bronx-born jewelry designer whose shop, JAR, on the Place Vendôme, caters to the richest of the rich, came up to Elbaz on his way out. “Latex Leggings was like Goya,” Rosenthal said. “Not goyim-Goya.”

After everyone had departed, Elbaz stood on a balcony overlooking the Place de la Concorde, eating a sandwich in the cold mist and frowning. “I wish I knew how to enjoy it more,” he said. “My psychologist says dissatisfaction, it’s the engine that keeps me going.”

That evening, Elbaz and his boyfriend for the past sixteen years, Alex Koo, ate a dinner of crêpes and smoked salmon with cold vodka at a Russian restaurant called Caviar Kaspia. Koo, a handsome Korean-American, has been the director of merchandising at Lanvin for the past three years. He wore a knee-length, dove-gray Lanvin cashmere sweater belted at the waist and round spectacles, and he had a ribbon loosely knotted into a necktie. “What do you think people were looking for at the Crillon?” Koo asked.

“To be touched,” Elbaz replied.

Koo used to work for Prada. “I realized when I came here that Alber doesn’t do marketing,” Koo said. “He doesn’t believe in commercial collections. He just wants the most beautiful piece. So there’s value.”

Elbaz bristles, for example, at the fashion concept of “groups,” as in a group of dresses in several colors, which is generally an expectation among buyers. “If I do a dress in red, it needs to be different proportions than if it’s in yellow,” Elbaz said, a little petulantly. His refusal to adhere to certain mores of the trade seems not so much a matter of principle as a gut-level horror that fills Elbaz if things do not accord with his vision. He told a story of a handbag debacle that nearly derailed his show this past fall at the Eiffel Tower.

“Two nights before the show, the bags arrive,” he said. “And I look at the bags and I hate them. Within a second, I got a migraine from depression. I thought, It’s a disaster-it’s just a disaster-it will never work. I go back to Alex, ‘Am I not seeing right? Everybody seems to like it and I hate it.’ And then it’s that moment that you have two choices either to give up or to start fighting. I said, ‘Everybody, we are going to meet again at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, all of us.’ Everybody came at eight o’clock-half asleep, half tired, three-quarters depressed-and we went bag by bag. We take off the chain. We put steam. We put it into water. We take off the closure. We edit the lucky charm that we have done on the bag. We took a pompom we have made out of grosgrain, we put it on the bag. I said to the girls, ‘Is that the bag you are not going to be able to let go if you see it in the store?’ They said yes. They say, ‘Now we do another bag from the same group?’ I said, Forget the groups! It’s not about groups! It’s not about marketing-where you need three sizes in four colors in five fabrics.” Elbaz shuddered. “And it was the first time that the numbers of the bags went like that,” he said, and pointed at the ceiling to indicate how well those difficult bags eventually sold. “And what was it that we added? We broke the formula. We make every mistake that you can do. I think that what we created, in the end, they were very emotional, those pieces. They didn’t look like they were done in a factory, they look like they were done by a human being.” He gave a bemused half smile. “Once you finish with a process like that, if they ask me to walk from here to there”-he pointed at the next table-”I have to take a taxi.”

Very little is painless or undramatic for Elbaz. That evening, he was worried about a meeting the next day with his architects, who were working on a new boutique, set to open in London in late March. “The architects say you can’t touch the walls,” Elbaz lamented, drinking a tiny glass of icy vodka. “I say, How can you have sex if you don’t touch the skin?” He was worried about the location of his next show. He was worried about this article. He was worried about where he and Koo would go for their vacation, which would start in two days and last for four. (They decided on Morocco, but then Elbaz got kidney stones.) “If I had a kid, I’d have to live in a penthouse of the hospital,” Elbaz said. “Every time he sneeze I’d want him checked.” On the bright side, then he’d get to live in a hospital-an oasis of care. “I like everything about hospitals,” Elbaz said. “Lycra Leggings Even the food.”

Fashion people tend to clump in all the same places, and Caviar Kaspia at couture time is one such. Colleagues kept coming by the table to pay their respects to Elbaz as he ate. The designer Giambattista Valli complimented him on his broken-brooch-from-your-grandmother/something-your-daughter-brought-home-from-kindergarten necklace. The former Harper’s Bazaar editor Kate Betts told Elbaz that she’d been quoting him all day. That is, she’d been quoting Elbaz quoting Geoffrey Beene quoting Coco Chanel, who said, “It’s not about what’s new, it’s about what’s good.” It was something Elbaz repeated to all three groups at the Crillon.

Though he’s been at it for a while, Elbaz’s job does not seem to get easier for him. “I was walking with Yves Saint Laurent one night before a show with his dogs,” Elbaz said. “I said, ‘How are you?’ And he said, ‘Scared.’ I said, ‘Even after all these years?’ He said, ‘Because of all the years.’ “

About the Author

Koo used to work for Prada. “I realized when I came here that Alber doesn’t do marketing,” Koo said. “He doesn’t believe in commercial collections. He just wants the most beautiful piece. So there’s value.”

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