Miss Nash

Alber Elbaz: “I remember in 2000, when I was working at Yves Saint Laurent, I was on my way to the office and I saw Mr Saint Laurent walking his dog. It was the night before his haute couture show. I asked him how he was feeling and he said, ‘I’m very nervous and very stressed.’ I replied, ‘Why, after all of these years, are you still stressed before a show?’. He responded, ‘Because of all these years’. I didn’t really understand at the time, but years later, I realised over time that when I was working on a collection, these were the same feelings I was experiencing. Season after season, we are going through this fear, this pain, this anxiety attack that we are all going to lose it. That we’re not going to finish. That it’s going to be terrible. And I don’t know if we can do it any differently. I don’t know if design, art and creation is always coming from pain, or if it can come from beauty.

Everything has to be so fast and rapid these days. I feel that I am part of the marathon of fashion and I feel the constant pressure to produce bigger, better and faster, and these days, cheaper. I often think about how a musician can have a great career with 10 brilliant songs, a director with five films, and a writer, three books. Then a fashion designer has to do six to eight shows per year – if one works for 25 years, that’s easily 200 shows.

For a long time I’ve wondered what it is that I bring to women, what it is that I do for them. And then one day I got an SMS from a friend in New York, which said: ‘Hi Alber, I’m in the back of a taxi, going to the court. I’m going to face my asshole husband in a divorce case and I’m wearing Lanvin, and I feel so protected’. That is one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever had. I thought that if a dress I had made in silk, weighing around 150g could protect a woman against her asshole husband, then I had succeeded. It made me very happy.”

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