AKQA Paris sculpts ALAÏA’s digital flagship around couture precision — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

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.

AKQA’s conceptual foundation emerged from what they called Sculptural Beauty – a framework born from the tension between Azzedine’s legacy and Mulier’s contemporary vision. The founder represents the sculptural; the current creative director embodies beauty. From there, the team developed specific design pillars tied directly to brand codes. “Landing on the design concept was our way of making sure what we were doing was unique to ALAÏA,” explains Cardiel. “It was our compass during the whole project.”

The typographic choice reinforces that architectural sensibility. TT Norms, a geometric sans serif from TypeType foundry, anchors the experience with minimal, precise forms that echo the brand’s design ethos. “The link between ALAÏA and architecture is strong, expressed in many ways: from the geometric nature of the products themselves to the striking spaces chosen for their runway shows, like the Guggenheim,” notes Cardiel. The typeface proved versatile enough to carry bold editorial claims while serving as a strong compositional element on its own – a balance the team describes as moving between maximalism and minimalism depending on context.

That oscillation defines the user experience. On editorial content pages, photography dominates without apology. Scroll depth and generous white space invite users to immerse themselves in the Maison’s uncompromising art direction. But “as soon as they start a shoppable navigation, we serve the product with a clean minimal UI letting the visual breathe, guiding users to the buying act," explains Senior Designer Amelie Lecomte. “Product packshots are pure and highlight ALAÏA’s iconic forms, treating them as pieces of art.”

The navigation itself carries meaning. Iconic shapes representing the simplest form of a product guide users through the site – a subtle nod to Azzedine’s practice of reducing garments to their essential silhouettes. On product listing pages, a two-column desktop layout (single column on mobile) presents pieces as gallery works rather than inventory. Typography on collection pages becomes compositional, with bold claims arranged as visual statements in their own right.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature emerged from the Maison’s own innovation during the project: 360° product views that allow garments to rotate endlessly before the viewer’s eye. The concept originated with ALAÏA’s internal team, but AKQA recognised its potential as a signature digital moment. “Our mission was how to elevate it in the digital space,” says Lecomte. ”In collaboration with the ALAÏA teams, we recommended using the Looks page as the main stage to showcase these silhouettes. The 360° view is a genius way for users to understand better the full silhouette and all the products composing it.”

The palette remains characteristically restrained – signature black and white pierced with shocks of ALAÏA red. Negative space receives the same reverence as fabric, cut and shaped with intention. Each frame functions as a portrait in motion, whether displaying a campaign image or a product packshot.

What distinguished this collaboration was its efficiency. Having Mulier and Serrano so present throughout the process created a cascade effect. “Their commitment rubbed off on their teams and on us, allowing everybody to go in the same direction and move forward quickly,” Cardiel reflects. That alignment filtered through to the day-to-day partnership with Global E-commerce & Omnichannel Director Florian Boissy and Product Owner E-commerce Melodie Cardot, whose dedicated involvement kept the project moving with the same precision that defines the Maison’s work. This collaborative structure even unlocked additional content for the website’s launch that might otherwise have remained inaccessible.

The finished platform navigates a delicate balance: reconciling commerce and editorial on pages like ‘shop the look’ by creating dialogue between campaign imagery and product photography. It honours the print-first content universe ALAÏA had cultivated while transforming it into something service-led and shoppable. Every scroll behaves like an ALAÏA silhouette – sculpted, deliberate, alive. What the project ultimately demonstrates is what becomes possible when a brand grants genuine access to its creative leadership. For a house built on the principle that clothes should be constructed directly on the body, AKQA found a way to build a digital experience with similar intimacy – shaped around the forms it was designed to serve.