Alaïa Opens the Doors to a SANAA-Designed Paris Flagship

Within the Fifties, Tunisian couturier Azzedine Alaïa moved to Paris to enter the world of trend. After design stints at Dior and Yves Saint Laurent, he opened his first atelier in 1979. Run out of his Parisian residence, the garments he designed for the likes of Greta Garbo had been synonymous with beautiful tailoring that accented the feminine kind.

Nearly 50 years later, Paris stays the capital of couture, and Maison Alaïa continues to be considered one of its key gamers. It’s solely becoming for the home’s new flagship can be positioned at 15 Rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré, a winding strip within the metropolis’s eighth arrondissement affiliated with excessive model, which additionally hosts Hermès, Bottega Veneta, and Alexander McQueen shops.

15 Faubourg Saint Honoré completes a trilogy of kinds, with every of Alaïa’s three Parisian boutiques representing a definite side of the model. In collaboration with Alaïa’s artistic director Pieter Mulier, the newest retailer was designed by architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of Japanese structure agency SANAA. This previous 12 months, the studio identified for Grace Farms and different daring works received the celebrated 2025 Le Prix Charlotte Perriand, an honor recognizing their visionary contributions to fashionable structure and design. “We’re honored to have had the chance to work with Alaïa on the design of this new boutique,” the duo tells AD. “It’s a house of sentimental boundaries and delicate reflections that wraps and unravels round guests like a second pores and skin, dissolving right into a subject of objects as individuals transfer up by means of the layers of the venture.”

Tubular rooms in tongue-pink tones punctuate the inside.

The thought of “second pores and skin”—a barrier, a protect, one thing intimate, indecent, or familial—is integral to Alaïa, a key a part of the home’s design language. Delicate, sculptural varieties and signature curves outline the couture created because the ’80s. The brand new flagship’s inside evokes this idea by means of tongue-pink tones and different nudes in the home’s repertoire of colours. On the bottom ground, 4 clear tubular rooms are every devoted to a definite vary of garments and equipment. In these glass rooms, time stands nonetheless, and merchandise turn into a kind of specimen. Guests peek in and really feel virtually indiscrete—they’re now concerned in an exhibitionist show.