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Azzedine Alaïa, Fashion’s Most Independent Designer, Is Dead at 82

Azzedine Alaïa, one of the greatest and most uncompromising designers of the 20th and 21st centuries, died on Saturday in Paris. He was 82.

His company said the cause was a heart attack.

Known as a sculptor of the female form, and worn by women from Michelle Obama to Lady Gaga, Mr. Alaïa was equally famous for his rejection of the fashion system and his belief that it had corrupted the creative power of what could be an art form.

He rarely hewed to the official show calendar, preferring to reveal his work when he deemed it ready, as opposed to when retailers or the press demanded it.

Instead he built his own system, and family of collaborators and supporters, and since the turn of the millennium had become an increasingly important voice for the value of striving to perfect and explore a single proprietary aesthetic, and against giving in to the relentless pressure to produce collections.

“I dressed women directly on their body, by intuition. This is how I gained experience,” he once said.

His kitchen, where he was famous for holding free-flowing lunch and dinner gatherings, for which he often cooked, was his soapbox. There he would regale guests — who could include designers, Kardashians, the artist Julian Schnabel, the architect Peter Marino and seamstresses from his ateliers — long into the night with opinions, stories and exhortations.

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. “I thought fashion was about embellishment as a kid, and when I saw Azzedine’s work I understood fashion was about construction and architecture too. To have an amazing idea and the capacity to realize it yourself is the definitive act of a designer.”

Diminutive in stature — at least compared to supermodels like Naomi Campbell, who called him “Papa,” as he was a guardian of sorts for her in Paris at the beginning of her career, and Farida Khelfa — he was always attired in a uniform of black Chinese cotton pajamas. He was famous for working long hours alone, bent over patterns and pieces of fabric, with National Geographic programs playing on the wide-screen TV nearby next to a pillar collaged with photos of friends and their families.

He was also mischievous: He often lied about his age, once told a journalist that his mother was a Swedish model, and liked to hide from his staff members and then startle them by jumping out with a whistle. Prone to holding grudges, fond of animals (he had three dogs — including a St. Bernard — and eight cats), he could also be extraordinarily generous.

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From the Alaïa fall 2017 couture collection, shown in Paris.Credit...Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times

Mr. Alaïa dedicated his life to the belief that fashion was more than just garments; to him, they were as much an element in the empowerment of women and of a broader cultural conversation.

An exhibit of his work in 2015 at the Villa Borghese in Rome, where his gowns held their own among the Caravaggios and Berninis, suggested that he had achieved that goal.

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 midwife that helped in giving birth to my whole family,” he recalled in an interview with the fashion magazine The Ground in 2011. “I told her that 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, “against my father’s will.”

He also 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 sewing with the nuns, and she had a notebook with all the basics. That was my first real experience with fashion, and while I was in the shop, I improved dramatically.”

He added: “Close to the boutique, there was a beautiful palace where two wealthy girls spent their days looking out the balcony. They saw me going in and out of the shop with cartons and fabrics, and finally, one day after school, they came up to question me about my work and invited me to their house that same night.”

There Mr. Alaïa met a cousin of the girls’ who wore Christian Dior and Balmain dresses, and through her he found work with a dressmaker who made copies of Balmain clothing.

From there, with help from a well-connected friend of the cousin’s, he went to Paris, to work for Dior, in 1957. Living in the “chambre de bonne” of Comtesse Nicole de Blégiers, he paid his rent by making clothes for her and babysitting her children.

Word spread, and he became an inside secret of the great and good of French society; clients included the writer Louise de Vilmorin, Cécile and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, of the banking family, and the actress Arletty. He opened his own maison in 1979.

Mr. Alaïa introduced his first ready-to-wear collection in 1980 and was soon hailed as “the king of cling” — though his garments were much more than that: He used leather and knits to shape and support the body, transforming it into the best version of itself. He eschewed external decoration for internal integrity, weaving pattern and adornment into the weft of the garment itself in ways that were almost undetectable to the outside eye.

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Styles from the Alaïa ready-to-wear collection for Spring 2014.Credit...Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times

Celebratory of feminine physicality without falling into the trap of exploiting it, his work coincided with and helped create the supermodel phenomenon. His shows, rarely publicized, without any of the bells and whistles that now are now de rigueur, were nevertheless among the most influential and jam-packed.

He didn’t care, and people were often kept waiting for hours until he was ready.

“He’s an artist at the end of the day, and he doesn’t have any sense of time,” said Ms. Campbell in Mr. McKenna’s film. “I remember [at model] Stephanie Seymour’s wedding, at the reception after the church wedding, and he was still stitching our bridesmaids dresses. He cannot let it be seen until it is completely finished.”

Though his aesthetic fell out of fashion with the advent of deconstructed minimalism in the 1990s, Mr. Alaïa never allowed himself to be distracted by the pressures of others, and by the year 2000 acolytes began returning to his atelier, a complex of buildings on Rue de Moussy in the Fourth Arrondissement, where he lived, worked and cooked (and later opened a three-apartment hotel). They were drawn by both his work and what he stood for: independent thought in an industry ruled by trend.

Indeed, one of the hallmarks of Mr. Alaïa’s clothes was their timelessness; they could be worn for decades, because they were not rooted in any identifiable season. As Artforum wrote in a review of a retrospective at the Palais Galliera and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2013: “The 40 decades of Alaïa’s work shown here reveals no defining trends, only an increasing interest in the refinement of technique, a kind of reverse neoclassicist ethos that lends soft flesh and airy fabric the smooth, uncanny weightiness of sculpture.”

Prada bought a stake in the business (later sold back to Mr. Alaïa), allowing it to become a force in accessories. In 2002 a number of Yves Saint Laurent’s former couture staff joined Alaïa after Mr. Saint Laurent’s retirement, including the heads of the tailoring and dressmaking ateliers.

In 2007, Compagnie Financière Richemont, the Swiss luxury group that also owns Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, became a significant investor, confirming Alaïa as an industry jewel and allowing it to expand at its own pace. A perfume was introduced and store expansion planned, and by last year Mr. Alaïa had more than 300 points of sale globally. His closest collaborator was Carla Sozzani, owner of the influential boutique 10 Corso Como.

Nevertheless, at a time when designers are more often called “chief creative officers,” and have teams of people to interpret and realize their ideas, Mr. Alaïa continued to oversee every garment, and every detail, himself, often without stopping for weekends or vacations.

“He did everything with his hands,” said the stylist Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele in the documentary. Though he had a house in Tunisia on the sea, he rarely managed to visit, because he was always working.

Beyond the runway, Mr. Alaïa created work for the ballet and the opera, began holding art exhibitions in 2004 in the space that also houses his showroom (regular programming began in 2015 with an exhibition by the Syrian poet Adonis) and was planning a bookstore.

He is survived by his partner, the painter Christoph von Weyhe; and nieces and nephews.

Mr. Alaïa returned to the couture calendar in July after six years. In the audience were Jack Lang, the former French minister of culture; Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, former first lady of France (and one-time Alaïa model); Isabelle Huppert, the actress; Marc Newson, the industrial designer; and Fabrice Hergott, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.

Mr. Alaïa had become the equivalent of a national treasure, and everyone was there to honor him.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 32 of the New York edition with the headline: Azzedine Alaïa, 82, Fashion Designer Known for His Independence, Dies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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