Nobody does it like Alaïa

For most people, these are feelings to be avoided — emotions you spend decades building walls to evade. These people probably have what’s called good self-esteem. Maybe they say they take themselves too seriously to care about what they wear, or maybe they are simply well-adjusted enough to wear what pleases or flatters them.

These are healthy people. Normal people. Sane people.

Those people are not the audience for the Alaïa show that Pieter Mulier, the creative director of the label since 2021, staged at the Guggenheim Museum on Friday night.

But for the truly fashion-pilled, those who live for beauty beyond what is rational, these intense emotions are what one seeks out. And they will be seduced by Mulier’s hooded coats in such a slim but rich wool that they seemed to melt over the head and shoulders; by a pale pink jersey skirt made of a padded ruffle that bumped with each of the model’s steps like an elusive animal; by silk taffeta gathered at the chest, the thigh, the cuff.

The 47-look collection was minimalist, as so much (too much) of fashion is these days, but rather than being monastic or self-conscious, it was a treatise on how to be sexy in 2024.

We are told that fashion is about novelty, about the introduction of a new idea, or new ways to be. Now that it feels impossible to create anything new — and not just in fashion, but also in entertainment, literature and even politics — we are told, by even myself, that it’s about style.

But a handful of designers are still capable of producing fashion, which is to say they make clothes that stir up a new emotion. They give you something you haven’t felt before.

Mulier’s spherical world was grand but sleek, sexy but complex. His models swirled languidly down the rotunda of the Guggenheim, as if coming down to earth for a moment; it was several minutes before we saw anything but the models’ heads, or the bright sleeve of a coat made of countless tiny curled coils of fabric, or the bare shoulder, moving like cool marbles in a groove. The setting built up an obscenely luxurious sense of anticipation. And who can do that these days? Everyone seems to want to give us everything, and right away.

Alaïa works differently, at least under Mulier. Speaking in late August, the Atlanta retailer Lauren Amos, who wore a flaming orange Alaïa coat to Friday’s show, said that the brand is so popular, even men are buying its large leather belts, shoes and bags from her store, ANT/DOTE. It speaks to those who are at once glitzy and cerebral: “It has definitely gone in a sexy direction, but it has the history to withstand it. The designs have been timeless and beautiful and sculptural and smart.”

Alaïa has always been a special brand. The late Azzedine Alaïa, a petite Tunisian man, was an old spirit, a collector of gowns by golden-era Hollywood costumer Adrian, freaky couturier Charles James and classicist Madame Vionnet, which are often on display at his atelier in Paris. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, he made fashion into an intellectual pursuit without ever seeming bone-headedly avant-garde and, as many of his peers did, without ever covering women up. Artists such as painter Jennifer Bartlett and musician Grace Jones loved his clothes. He sculpted and revealed the body while somehow simultaneously arming it.

Mulier, who usually shows in Paris during Couture Week in January and July, conjured that seemingly long-gone world quite magically. There was gallerist Tony Shafrazi pointing his camera up at Naomi Campbell and Stephanie Seymour, and Linda Evangelista brushing past a partner at David Zwirner to air-kiss Amber Valletta. The set put many of the 200 guests in the center, seated on little round, gray tuffets, while others lined the perimeter of the rotunda, an arrangement that recalled Halston’s sunken living room that beckoned partyers, W Magazine readers and oglers decades ago with its mix of sexpots and the intelligentsia, glamorous insiders sipping cocktails with bodies dressed in smooth Ultrasuede.

Those with a less romantic outlook might also imagine that Mulier had something more commercial in mind: speaking to the many American women who have glommed on to his accessories, such as his hit ballet flats made of fishnet, or studded with rhinestones or spikes. But the collection came about when the museum reached out after seeing a spiral-bodied dress he made for Fall 2024 that its staff thought resembled its Frank Lloyd Wright structure and that Zendaya made famous earlier this year while promoting “Dune: Part Two.”

Yet Azzedine Alaïa always had affiliations with the United States, and Mulier wanted to emphasize that: In his show notes, he name-checked American greats such as Halston and Claire McCardell, and recalled when Alaïa took over the Palladium nightclub in 1985, fusing the madness of art and nightlife with the precision of his designs. The event marked that fashion could be provocative and intelligent — it is rarely either of those, let alone both — and it was a sensation.

But this was no anthology of American design. Sure, there was a Charles James-esque puffer and easy jersey dresses that skimmed the bod, Halston-style, and in general a sense of freedom, a patriotic quality, or so we say. But Mulier’s collection was thoroughly, sublimely European in its exquisite technique: The little pleats on the pants in the final two looks, and the details of the molded cutout dresses that appeared to lock around the back three-quarters of the models’ bodies, leaving a curved sliver of their figures exposed, are worth zooming in on, or examining in your local luxury department store when they arrive next spring.

Some of the robe-like wool coats skimmed over undulating skater skirts. Fabrics bobbed, swagged and even seemed to ooze. Very few women are wealthy or, let’s face it, thin enough to wear these clothes, many of which clung to bra-less breasts or revealed the entire abdomen and both arms, or were completely open in the back. But these are the kinds of clothes that make a true believer throw their hands in the air and say: So what?

Chic is an abused word. Few people know what it really means, but in Mulier’s hands, it seems to mean you are complicated, aloof and all the more compelling for it. You’re an original, and you know better than to question yourself.

Very few brands cultivate desire beyond reason. Alaïa, the man, could do it. His clothes made women feel extraordinary. Compared with Mulier, he had a more forgiving, more sorcerous understanding of women, whom he saw not as his dolls or playthings but as human beings to ennoble.

But Mulier knows how to show femininity as strength. His collection was so awesome that I neglected to mention until now that Rihanna was there. He gives a woman the untouchability of a great 1940s movie star, imperious in her sexuality, poised enough to know that feelings are not weakness but a sign of depth. Female sensuality is no ditzy lark.