Joseph Altuzarra is one of more than 250 designers - including titans like Ralph Lauren, Marc Jacobs and Carolina Herrera - who paraded their wares in New York for 10 days this month. But none have generated the buzz that Mr. Altuzarra has recently.
“They begin with a mood,” Mr. Altuzarra said of his current designs. “It really is just that. It’s not, like, ‘Oh, I’m into the ‘70s,’ but more, ‘I’m happy, I’m sad, I’m hurt, someone has just broken up with me.’ I try to sustain that for a while.”
Mr. Altuzarra must be doing something right. At the close of his fashion show in Manhattan last September, spectators sprang to their feet. Industry power brokers like Linda Fargo, the fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman; Simon Doonan of Barneys New York; and Hamish Bowles of Vogue rushed backstage to throw their arms around Mr. Altuzarra .
When the crowd had subsided, Mr. Altuzarra turned to a stream of reporters, spooling off his fashion influences . His inspirations - a pastiche of urban signage, modern technology, tribal elements and rave culture - were “fractured,” he said.
Those influences had coalesced in an audacious spring 2011 runway show of suits and dresses spliced with python and metallic leather, python and silver skirts, and jersey sheaths in a melange of grays reminiscent of a newsprint collage. Artfully constructed, they married a rigor worthy of a nun with the steaminess of a streetwalker.
Five months in gestation, the show was over in a scant 12 minutes, marking an ending of the feverish cycle that is capped twice each year by the advent of another hectic New York Fashion Week. But if Mr. Altuzarra was feeling tapped out, he gave no sign of it. “I’m just relieved,” he said.
Since mounting his first show in the winter of 2009, Mr. Altuzarra, 27, has been lionized and scrutinized . His dark, feline good looks, candor and deft hand with a seam have captivated an oddly assorted clientele that includes the socialite Lauren Santo Domingo, the pop stars Rihanna and Mary J. Blige, and Carine Roitfeld, the recently decamped editor of Paris Vogue, all eager to pronounce him fashion’s Next New Thing.
But there have been setbacks , not least being passed over for an award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. And there have been tensions.
“Fashion can be a pressure cooker,” Mr. Altuzarra said. “Every season you feel it intensify a little more.”
Indeed, as he basked in the adulation last September 11, he knew it was not likely to last. “I’m comfortable with the idea that I’m the flavor of the moment and that in a couple of years people might not think I’m cool anymore,” he said.
A year earlier, he had been melancholy. “I had this feeling like I had forgotten to be young,” he said. “When you’re starting a company you begin to think you’re 45.” His spring collection was conceived as a kind of corrective, he said. “It was about being young and taking risks, about not being safe.”
Mr. Altuzarra, the son of a French- Basque father and Chinese-American mother, toggles each season between New York, where he is based, and Paris, where he refines his collections. Last year the brand turned a profit, making a leap from 3 stores and 80 pieces to about 30 stores and 1,800 pieces and taking in some $4 million in retail sales.
Mr. Altuzarra’s designs have been compared to those of Tom Ford, one of his idols, and Azzedine Alaia. He has interned with Marc Jacobs and apprenticed with Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy. But in conceiving his collections he tends to burrow deep inside his head, revisiting scenes from his childhood in Paris.
Recently, Mr. Altuzarra sat at his desk in a loft in Manhattan fretting over the snaps for a parka. He murmured directives in French, glancing up from time to time to inspect the clothes, which, to his consternation, had arrived just the weekend before.
Never mind. He was going to put a cool face on things. Since September, he had breathed last-minute life into a collection that had resided for months only as a phantom in his head. He had come full circle.
By RUTH LA FERLA
