In the moments before the start of Alaïa's ready-towear show in Paris this summer, the house's creative director since 2021, Pieter Mulier, stood out among the team for his qualities of ease and calm. He spent some minutes chatting with his backstage visitors. He wandered over to the make-up room, found he wasn't needed, and sat on a kerb with the model Julia Nobis to talk. Shows weren't always so comfortable. His last one, held within his apartment in Antwerp had driven him into a nervous state, but this one took its rhythm from the summer evening and announced Mulier's advancement to a master's station. The runway would be Passerelle Léopold Sédar Senghor, spanning the Seine between the Tuileries and Musée d'Orsay. This bridge was one of the city's quiet marvels of engineering, and, as the sun aligned with a western breeze, it exemplified the warm and precise refinement that has given Mulier's work at Alaïa its magnetic appeal. “I try to keep a little bit of the family aspect of Alaïa in the studio,” Mulier says. “Everything is on a human scale.”
At 44, Mulier is at once a new arrival in the firmament of creative directors—Alaïa is the first house he has led—and one of fashion's ensconced steady hands. For 16 years he served as Raf Simons's deputy and sounding board, moving along with his mentor's career as it rose toward ever-larger labels and distinguishing himself not only by his creative point of view but by his skill in managing large teams. When he was picked to succeed the Tunisian-born designer Azzedine Alaïa, who died in 2017 after reimagining the language of body-conscious tailoring, many wondered whether Mulier could finesse the transition, teasing forth the brand's fragile magic while pushing his own fresher vision through. “Alaïa felt so specific to Azzedine and to that time that it seemed it was going to be impossible for it to happen again,” says Julianne Moore, who found herself rejoining the collection waiting lists after Mulier's debut in the summer of 2021. “Pieter managed to do it.”
In person, Mulier is tall and skinny, with a boyish whoosh of hair just greying and a teenager's spidery way of dangling his forearms from cocked elbows. He dresses most days in white or black sweatshirts and jeans (no logos) and leads his house in the spirit of a team captain, calling plays from the field and cheering colleagues on. At a fitting two days earlier, he kept the show music cranked up and struck prattling conversations with the models as they entered. “When you're waiting for your fitting, all you hear is 'Wow!' and clapping,” says the model Élise Crombez. “It was as
