The Alaïa Spring 2024 ad campaign demonstrates an understanding of dynamic silhouettes, anchoring with the brand’s signature aesthetic. Pieter Mulier explores time not as an abstract concept but a material notion – its signs and signifiers, its reflections through fashion.

The idea of creation, of craft, of fashion as a verb – tracing its etymological origins in facere, to do, to make – can be a measure of time taken, care given. Expanding these notions, the human figure itself can be fashioned, manipulated through the push and pull of clothes, to transform. A heightened bombshell silhouette, tailored to reinforce the shape of the body, bears memories of pasts, and well as proposing a future.

Seams trace not only the form of the body but the life of these clothes, like timelines charting their evolution and refinement, the process behind their invention. Buttons are oddly emblematic of time, of process: the ritual of dress, of fastening of oneself into a garment, a time of change and reinvention, a promise of future revelation at their unfastening. Fabrications reflect a tactility, a sensuality: wool flannel, ostrich, cotton linen, transparent and lacquered knits, leather, latex.