“I feel quite empty and happy at the same time,” said Pieter Mulier backstage after his final show for Alaïa, which was met with a standing ovation. Mulier is leaving the house after five years at the helm for a new adventure: starting July 1, he will be assuming the role of creative director at Versace. “This last collection was about clothes to wear. What is a jacket? What is a dress? It’s basically a vocabulary of the last five years. It’s what I learned at Alaïa that I’m giving to the next designer. It’s like leaving the keys on the table. At Alaïa, I learned precision, I learned editing, and I learned that real luxury is a perfectly cut jacket,” Mulier continued.
The show took place earlier this evening at Paris’s Fondation Cartier. Hundreds of industry insiders, including Anna Wintour, Matthieu Blazy, and Mulier’s mentor Raf Simons, turned up to greet and cheer the outgoing designer in one half of the building’s ground floor. The other half was left empty, with one wall taken over by a huge screen that showed portraits of every single member of the Alaia design team.
A few days earlier, a briefcase containing a leather puzzle had arrived at guests’ residences: it was the show’s invitation. When put together, the pieces formed a brown bodice put together with metal studs. It was both a nod to founder Azzedine Alaïa’s legacy of form and Mulier’s building upon it, since he took over Alaïa’s creative teams in 2021.
Mulier’s architectural eye has been formative of the silhouette women leaned towards post-pandemic. Meanwhile, the mesh ballet flats and the Le Teckel shoulder bag he introduced during the same period became wardrobe staples. Alaïa owner Richemont doesn’t break out brand revenues, but group sales grew 11% year-on-year at constant exchange rates to €6.4 billion in the third quarter of fiscal 2025. In fewer words, Mulier’s Alaïa was good, and it sold well.
Mulier’s comms game is also strong. Over the years, his community has gotten used to receiving playful invitations, while his show notes have always been personal and vulnerable: the invitation to the Fall/Winter 2024 collection was a folding leather chair, whereas last season’s one was a WhatsApp text from the designer himself. At the first show after he took over the house in 2021, guests found on their seats a letter addressed to Azzedine: “I tried to get into your mind, but that’s impossible… We met, but I never had the opportunity to know you. Now, I have the opportunity to thank you,” it read.
Mulier was the first designer to assume the role of creative director at Alaïa, after the founder’s passing in November 2017. Speculation as to who might pick up the baton hasn’t quite started yet. I suppose we are all a little tired of the musical chairs? (Personally, I am incredibly tired of the phrase.) But there’s also another possible reason: the house took a whole three years to appoint Mulier, reissuing archival best-sellers until they found the right man for the job. Would that be possible in today’s world? One can only dream.
In the meantime, here’s what some buyers, press, and friends of the house had to say about Mulier’s era-defining tenure at Alaïa.
Bruno Astuto, chief fashion and creative officer of Brazil’s JHSF
Farewell collections are among fashion’s most treacherous exercises. When a designer has genuinely elevated a house, the exit demands a particular kind of courage: the courage of restraint. Pieter Mulier understood this. After a tenure at Alaïa that was nothing short of brilliant, he chose not to leave with a crescendo. There was none of the visual complexity that marked some of his most memorable chapters. Instead, he offered something far more difficult to achieve: sophisticated simplicity.