Azzedine Alaïa, one of the greatest and most uncompromising designers of the 20th and 21st centuries, died on Saturday in Paris. He was 82.
His company said the cause was a heart attack.
Known as a sculptor of the female form, and worn by women from Michelle Obama to Lady Gaga, Mr. Alaïa was equally famous for his rejection of the fashion system and his belief that it had corrupted the creative power of what could be an art form.
He rarely hewed to the official show calendar, preferring to reveal his work when he deemed it ready, as opposed to when retailers or press demanded it.
Instead he built his own system, and family of supporters, and since the turn of the millennium had become an increasingly important voice for the value of striving to perfect and explore a single proprietary aesthetic, and against giving in to the relentless pressure to produce collections.
He was also mischievous: He often lied about his age, once told a journalist that his mother was a Swedish model, and like to hide from his staff members and then startle them by jumping out with a whistle. Prone to hold grudges, he could also be extraordinarily generous.
Mr. Alaïa dedicated his life to the belief that fashion was more than just garments; to him, they were as much an element in the empowerment of women and of a broader cultural conversation.
An exhibit of his work in 2015 at the Villa Borghese in Rome, where his gowns held their own among the Caravaggios and Berninis, suggested that he had achieved that goal.
Azzedine Alaïa was born in Tunis, Tunisia, on Feb. 26, 1935 (though some biographical sources list his birth year as 1939 or 1940). His father ran a wheat farm outside the city.
Azzedine became interested in art and design at a young age.
“I was helping Madame Pinot, a midwife that helped in giving birth to my whole family,” he recalled in 2011. “I told her that I liked to draw. She gave me books, pamphlets to art exhibitions, and my first book of Picasso.”
Soon she registered him at the School of Fine Arts in Tunis, he said, “against my father’s will.”
He also found a job in a small dress shop. “The owner was looking for someone to finish up the dresses,” he said. “My sister had learned sewing with the nuns, and she had a notebook with all the basics. That was my first real experience with fashion, and while I was in the shop, I improved dramatically.”
He added: “Close to the boutique, there was a beautiful palace where two wealthy girls spent their days looking out the balcony. They saw me going in and out of the shop with cartons and fabrics, and finally, one day after school, they came up to question me about my work and invited me to their house that same night.”
There Mr. Alaïa met a cousin of the girls’ who wore Christian Dior and Balmain dresses, and through her he found work with a dressmaker who made copies of Balmain clothing.
From there, with help from a well-connected friend of the cousin’s, he went to Paris, to work for Dior, in 1957. Living in the “chambre de bonne” of Comtesse Nicole de Blégiers, he paid his rent by making clothes for her and babysitting her children.
Word spread, and he became an inside secret of the great and good of French society; clients included the writer Louise de Vilmorin, Cécile and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, of the banking family, and the actress Arletty. He opened his own maison in 1979.
Mr. Alaïa introduced his first ready-to-wear collection in 1980 and was soon hailed as “the king of cling” — though his garments were much more than that: He used leather and knits to shape and support the body, transforming it into the best version of itself.
Though his aesthetic fell out of fashion with the advent of deconstructed minimalism in the 1990s, Mr. Alaïa never allowed himself to be distracted by the trends of others, and by the year 2000 acolytes began returning to his atelier, a complex of buildings on Rue de Moussy in the Fourth Arrondissement, where he lived, worked and cooked.
In 2007, Compagnie Financière Richemont bought a majority stake in the business, allowing it to expand at its own pace. A Perfume and store expansion planned, and by last year Mr. Alaïa had more than 300 points of sale globally. His closest collaborator was Carla Sozzani, owner of the influential boutique 10 Corso Como.
Beyond the runway, Mr. Alaïa created work for the ballet and the opera, began holding art exhibitions in 2004 in the space that also houses his showroom (regular programming began in 2015 with an exhibition by the Syrian poet Adonis) and was planning a bookstore.
He is survived by his partner, the painter Christoph von Weyhe; and nieces and nephews.
In July after six years. In the audience were Jack Lang, the former French minister of culture; Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, former first lady of France (and one-time Alaïa model); Isabelle Huppert, the actress; Marc Newson, the industrial designer; and Fabrice Hergott, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.
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