How Kaia Gerber Came to Star in the Spring 2023 Alaïa Campaign

Of course, Mulier’s family looks different than Alaïa’s did. For the new campaign, the British photographer Tyrone Lebon photographed Gerber on the roof of the artist Sterling Ruby’s studio in LA. “I didn’t want a big set. You know, fashion sets nowadays, they’re so big, so big. It’s 50 people on set. Here it was only hair and makeup, Tyrone, an assistant, a stylist, Kaia, and her boyfriend [Austin Butler], nobody else. So it felt more like a ’90s shoot, remember when Calvin sent Kate [Moss] and Mario [Sorrenti] on holiday? It felt more like that—nothing orchestrated, nothing merchandised.”

“What’s most important is that it was shot in—how do you say?—a family situation. There was no merchandising on set, there was no art director on set. I quite believe in the energy between a photographer and a model. I wasn’t there either,” he went on. “I told them a little bit what I like, but I told Tyron to be inspired the most by the lights, by the space of Sterling, of course by the beauty of Kaia, but that it was his eye that I wanted, not my eye. Nowadays, everything’s pre-chewed, pre-fabricated. I quite liked the idea that it was just them to doing their thing and that’s it. Basically, I want more than natural way of how it used to be.”

Speaking of fashion’s past lives, for spring 2023 inspiration Mulier went back “way to the beginning of Azzedine, to the first shows, where everything was draped, minimally and naturally. It was squares: two points that you drape onto a body and that’s it,” he explained. “The first show that Azzedine ever did [for spring 1983], for me it’s genius.” For fall 2023, he’ll be adapting another Azzedine-ism. Though it’s a bit too soon to share his plans, Mulier did say this: “With everything going on in fashion, people traveling all around the world to see the most amazing sets that cost millions, what we’re planning is actually very simple. It will feel very Alaïa.”