AKQA Paris sculpts ALAÏA’s digital flagship around couture precision

Azzedine Alaïa famously dressed women, not windows – sculpting fabric directly onto bodies in his Marais atelier, treating each garment as architecture in motion. Today, Creative Director Pieter Mulier perpetuates that sculptural philosophy while shaping it with a contemporary vision of beauty and modernity. When AKQA Paris was tasked with creating a new digital home for ALAÏA, they faced an unusual challenge: how do you translate that physical intimacy – the drape of jersey across a hip, the precision of a seam that follows the spine – into a digital experience? The answer arrived through an unexpected collaboration. Unlike most luxury fashion projects, where creative directors remain distant figures glimpsed only in campaign imagery, AKQA worked directly with the brand’s Creative Director Pieter Mulier and CEO Myriam Serrano throughout the process. “It was truly a blessing, to be honest,” admits AKQA Paris’ Creative Director Sebastien Cardiel. “We’ve worked on many major fashion brand websites at the agency, and most of the time you never get access to the highest-level stakeholders.” That access proved transformative. Mulier, an architect by training who joined as Creative Director in 2021, speaks the same language of proportion and structure that has always defined the Maison. His involvement kept decisions anchored to the brand’s DNA rather than drifting toward generic luxury conventions. “What was remarkable is how attentive they were to the details,” Cardiel continues. “They always wanted to understand the how and why, which helped us maintain the right balance between business and design.” The timing carried particular weight. ALAÏA entered the redesign process riding triple-digit growth in an otherwise cautious luxury market – a period when customers, fatigued by interchangeable digital experiences, were rediscovering physical stores. With wholesale channels facing unprecedented challenges and direct-to-consumer becoming ever more strategic, the new platform needed to function as both cultural expression and commercial engine.