Tunisian Azzedine Alaia,  died on Saturday, November 18, 2017  in his adopted home of Paris where he was one of the couture fashion doyens.  His company said the cause was a heart attack.  He was eight-two years old.  Alaia was called a sculptor of the female form, notably worn by  the First Lady Michelle Obama   who once wore an Alaia sweated to Buckingham Palace (much to Oscar de la Renta’s horror) to Madonna and  Lady Gaga and then in the 1995 comedy Clueless Cher, opposes a robber’s demand to hit the pavement, saying her red dress “is an Alaia. It’s like a totally important designer. You just don’t do that to him.”

He “changed my conception of fashion,” said Nicolas Ghesquière, the artistic director of Louis Vuitton, in a documentary on Mr. Alaïa made by the stylist Joe McKenna and released this year.   Diminutive in stature, he just made five feet. His models called him “Papa,”, and like our header picture he always word a black Mao style tunic with pajamas because he “renounced bourgeoisie style”.

Azzedine Alaïa was born in Tunis, Tunisia, on Feb. 26, 1935 (though some biographical sources list his birth year as 1939 or 1940).    He had a twin sister and a younger brother, and his father ran a wheat farm outside the city.  Azzedine became interested in art and design at a young age.“I was helping Madame Pinot,” a French midwife he recalled in an interview with the fashion magazine The Ground in 2011.

Astrologically

1. Azzedine has a Grand Trine in Water with Pluto in the Fifth, showing popularity, Jupiter in the ninth which is rules telling us it was amongst the rich and Saturn in the twelfth highlighting his reclusiveness.
   1. Thus Alaia was a SPLAY as he has no oppositions in his chart.
2. Venus and Mars are in mutual reception, first and eighth houses, which are also according to Jones the Line of Efficiency and are in Tri-Septile aspect (we have had none like that previously.)
3. Line of Vitality is squared — he enjoyed challenges.
4. Line of Personality is squared.
5. Line of Culture is  sesquiquadrate — Alaia an old-fashioned couturist did not adjust well to modern CAD/CAM fashion design.

Download the Azzedina Alaia Chart

                                                                          Azzedine Starts out

“I told her I liked to draw. She gave me books, pamphlets to art exhibitions, and my first book of Picasso.”  Soon she registered him at the School of Fine Arts in Tunis. He said, “ much against my father’s will.”  From there, he found a job in a small dress shop. “The owner was looking for someone to finish up the dresses,” he said. “My sister had learned to sew with the nuns, so she had a notebook with all the basics that I copied. ”

                                     The Foundation

The painter Christoph von Weyhe, two years his junior, survives him.  They were together since 1959 when they met at the Ecole in Paris.  Azzedine also has several nieces and nephews.  After Azzedine’s death, von Weyhe set up the Fondation Azzedine Alaia  in Paris in his honour.