The exhibition was scheduled to close in May. The Fondation Alaïa has now kept its run open until midsummer, the only kind of extension that makes sense for two couturiers who refused to hurry.
At rue de la Verrerie in the Marais, ninety designs hang in low light. Alaïa pieces sit beside Dior, sometimes in dialogue, sometimes in plain rebuttal. The visitor walks the same path twice. Once for cloth. Once for the cut.
The exhibition opened on 1 December last year under the title Azzedine Alaïa and Christian Dior, Two Masters of Haute Couture. Olivier Saillard curated, with Gael Mamine and Sarah Perks alongside. The original close date sat in May. The Fondation announced this week the run will continue through 21 June, 2026.
Two hands
Saillard's argument is quiet. A pressed waist on a 1957 Dior set against an Alaïa wool dress from 1986. A Bar jacket from the New Look beside an Alaïa redingote in black gabardine. The work of the eye, the hand, the patient pin.
Alaïa collected Dior obsessively over four decades. Five hundred pieces by the Frenchman lived in the rue de Moussy archive. Some he wore. Some he studied. A few he took apart at the seam to learn how the volume was held.
That archive now functions as a working library, not a tomb. The Galerie Dior shows roughly a hundred of those pieces across the river at avenue Montaigne. The two exhibitions read as one long sentence broken into clauses.
Two designers, decades apart, both convinced the cut is a form of moral attention. The exhibition lets the cloth carry the argument.
Camille AshworthA longer run
Tickets at the Fondation had been climbing through April. Visitors queued past the doors of the courtyard café on weekends, and the gift shop ran short of catalogues twice. The decision to extend reads as practical. It also reads like respect.
The Galerie Dior closes on 3 May. The Fondation Alaïa now closes on 21 June. Six weeks of overlap, a brief season when the same garments appear on both sides of the city, in different light.
What survives
Saillard works mostly without text on the walls. The clothes do the speaking. A taffeta evening dress in archival rose. A coat with horizontal box pleats falling from a high yoke. A cocktail dress where the bodice is constructed as a single bias-cut spiral.
Photography by Stéphane Aït Ouarab. Courtesy Fondation Azzedine Alaïa via Wallpaper*.
Alaïa worked first in Tunisia, then Paris. Dior worked from rue Montaigne. Decades separate them. The garments do not seem to know.
The closing date is 21 June, 2026. The sun stays late in Paris by then. The gallery's upper rooms catch most of it.