Alber Elbaz: Love Brings Love

On April 24, 2021, the designer Alber Elbaz passed away due to complications from Covid-19. The artistic director of the House of Lanvin from 2001 to 2016, he was the most consequential figure from the fashion community lost to the pandemic. Love Brings Love, the celebration of Alber Elbaz s life and work that concluded Paris Fashion Week on October 5, 2021 remains a unique event in the recent history of the industry. In tribute, 44 designers, from nearly all the French and Italian maisons, to his dear friends in Japan and the United States, created dresses for a memorial fashion show the first collaborative one to have ever been held in Paris. Of the over 70 looks, thirty were by Alber, posthumously executed by his team at AZ Factory. The international fashion community came as one family to publicly mourn and remember one of their own, with a reverence and affection reserved only to someone so universally and genuinely loved. The book is divided into three parts, which includes texts written by Alber prior to his passing, a sequence of sketches by 44 designers/maisons, including Alexander McQueen, Balenciaga, Comme des Garcons, Giambattista Valli, Gucci, John Paul Gaultier, Rick Owens, Valentino, on uncoated stock, and a section of completed dresses, including dresses designed by Alber, on matte coated stock. The sequence describes in ways both conceptual and material how his friends and peers saw him, and how they intimately honored his memory with their own work.