Lanvin's man in charge turned up at The Met earlier this week and dished on a whole lot of things. We were either not privileged enough to attend or didn't even know he'd be there because we decidedly did not have our ear to the ground. Probably both. WWD recapped his conversation that touched on everything from his hometown of Casablanca, Morocco to his hopping around the fashion industry from Yves Saint Laurent, where he lost his job after Tom Ford came aboard, to Lanvin, which he joined after an 18 month traveling sabbatical once he found himself jobless.
Apparently, he was one of the first designers to do pre-collections, which essentially just started as small shows in between fashion weeks before eventually snowballing into this massive part of the industry. You can go ahead and thank him for that. But his best quotes come in regards to technology. It's well known the fashion designers are quirky humans who either love or hate tech. There's not much in-between. While Karl Lagerfeld famously hates it from a more curmudgeon point of view, Elbaz is a little more downtrodden:
Elbaz doesn’t e-mail and lamented that people don’t talk anymore. Rather, they post and tape and film. “We want to document the moment,” he said. “It’s not just going on a vacation, it’s documenting it with photogenic friends.” ... Instagram also gets Elbaz down. “Even with a simple dinner, the mozzarella looks sexy,” he said. “I go to work and make sure everybody else has a glamorous life. Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a [parallel universe].
I mean, considering shit like wall scouting exist, he's not wrong. It's all about projecting a certain version of yourself to the outside world, while actually hating your life and wanting to die on the inside, right?
