Alber Elbaz shares truth about fashion

The Lanvin creative director held forth on the topic of ‘truth’ at the annual festival of arts and ideas. The first truth he told? Designing is hard work.

‘You can buy anything you want. The one thing you cannot buy is talent. You cannot buy a muscle,’ he said. ‘To get muscle, it’s hard work. And it’s not coming overnight. It’s a long process, day after day, that you go to the gym, to get a little bit of something. That’s how it is to be a designer. You cannot just wake up one morning and say, “I’m famous, let’s be a designer.” You have to work damn hard for that, to become one.’

The rigours of design don’t ease with critical acclaim—they intensify. Elbaz shared an anecdote about running into an anxious, stressed Yves Saint Laurent in Paris the night before one of the designer’s couture shows.

‘I looked at him and said, “But why? After all these years, are you still stressed before a show?” And he looked at me and said, “Because of all these years.” I don’t think that I got it at the time, but many years later, and every time I start working on a show, this is what I’m going through. Year after year, season after season, we are going through this fear, this pain, this anxiety attack that we are going to lose it this time, that we are not going to finish it, that it’s going to be terrible,’ he said.

‘I don’t know if design and art and creation is always coming from pain, or if it can be coming from beauty.’

Elbaz’s never-good-enough neuroses drive him to seek more perfect solutions to fashion problems. He oversees every detail of Lanvin store designs, develops migraines from exposure to unsuitable handbag prototypes and loves hospitals for the ‘just in case’ availability of medical care they