Alber Elbaz (Hebrew: אלבר אלבז, born 6 February 1961) is a Moroccan-Israeli fashion designer. After a number of other fashion houses, he was the creative director Lanvin in Paris from 2001 until October 2015.
I adore women, and the one thing I want to do more than anything is to see a transformation of personality when someone puts on one of my dresses.
Fashion is like a fruit, you couldn't eat it a day before and you can't eat it a day after; it's just about today
In fashion we're lucky, we make dreams come true.
I think that if you want to pass emotion, you have to write a letter. Emotions do not pass in SMS or in e-mail.
If you take something out of the freezer, it's cold, but what happens when it melts? It's a cool party, a cool person, a cool collection. What does that mean? I'm more interested in things that are uncool, things that have a certain individuality, a certain soul, a certain longevity, emotion, fragility.
Yves Saint Laurent gave women power, Chanel liberated them and when I joined Lanvin, I thought 'what do I bring to women? One day, I received an SMS from a friend in New York - she was in a taxi on the way to court to face her arsehole ex-husband, and she said to me 'Alber, I am wearing a Lanvin dress, and I feel so protected. ' That to me was the biggest compliment I ever received. To have a 500 gram piece of silk make her feel protected - that made me very happy indeed.
I was thinking recently, If the body really is the new dress, as some are saying - with women buying boobs, butts, faces - then who needs a dressmaker? So I started designing spring like a plastic surgeon - everything stretchy and nude. But after three weeks, I was so bored with myself and the world, I began adding diamond butterflies and chiffon and colors. I realized that fashion is not about second skin. It's not the perfect white shirt or camel jacket. What women need is a dream.
If I were a buyer today in one of the American department stores, I would go with extremes-the most beautiful, the more expensive, the more eccentric. I would take risks. The worst thing would be to buy only the little black dress. You know why? Because everyone has it already. I would go with a purple dress, something different
I think that because I'm overweight, [my] fantasy was lightness. So I project my fantasy to the clothes, and now all I do is light, light clothes because it's the one thing I don't have. That is why I'm too afraid to lose weight because then I might make heavy clothes.
What we want is clothing we think we can fly in. That's why I opened the show with flying dresses.
I am very much a people person.
Making them feel gorgeous and comfortable is my way of making women's lives easier.
If you change a woman’s look, you change her persona
I am always trying to put myself inside: Every dress I do, I think, 'If I were a woman, would I wear it?'
When a woman's clothes are in harmony with her emotions, she shines from within.
There is nothing scarier than being ‘the designer of the moment,’ because the moment ends.
Run away from laziness; work hard. Touch intuition and listen to the heart, not marketing directors. Dream.
I was a fat child; I was asthmatic. No wonder I'm a hypochondriac.
I like having the freedom to dress as I desire.
Some days I feel like a piano: kind of short, always in black & white, always expected to produce music.