PRETTY THINGS.(Hedi Slimane)(Interview)

Hedi Slimane sits alone in his room, in a pleasant but not very fashionable part of Paris, mooning over an album cover. He has just turned six. The year is 1974. The record, a birthday gift from a friend of his older sister, is "David Live"--David Bowie, recorded at the Tower Theatre in Philadelphia. The friend, Veronique, likes to put on a blue jumpsuit and imitate Bowie. She does a good Mick Jagger, too. Slimane is captivated by her. He is also captivated by the album cover, which features a photograph of Bowie onstage, dressed in a powder-blue double-breasted suit: the jacket is cut short, with narrow but square shoulders, and the pants, although pleated and billowy in the legs, are tight at the crotch. Bowie looks bloodless and emaciated, well on his way to his "Thin White Duke" phase, during which he subsisted, as he later said, on "peppers, cocaine, and milk."

Taste has to come from somewhere. Thirty years later, after Slimane has become a celebrated fashion designer who occasionally claims that he has no precedents or influences--who declares, "I have no nostalgia"--he allows that his sensibility owes a lot to "David Live" and to the early sight of this cool and cadaverous androgyne striking an angular pose. "When you're a kid, you stare at things like this," he says. "There is a moment of isolation in your room--a moment, maybe, of boredom." There are many things that can contribute to a boy's sense that another world exists out there, but, in 1974, nothing quite beat album covers, David Bowie, or older girls in blue jumpsuits.

Slimane designs menswear for Christian Dior, the venerable Paris fashion house. It is often said that he has transformed the male silhouette. Slimane's clothes are generally made for and modelled by whip-thin young men, and among the tastemaking classes--rock stars, magazine editors, sugar daddies--the enthusiasm for his slender cuts has helped the scrawny lad displace the beefy gent as the body type of the age. (Slimane believes in what he once called a "morphology of decades.") The extent to which this transformation has affected either the general public or the bottom line of LVMH, the company that controls Christian Dior and Slimane's division, Dior Homme, is debatable, but such considerations hardly rate with the sophisticates who see him as a standard-bearer for a movement to infuse the old male armor--suits, tuxedos, jeans--with the insouciance and youth of rock and roll. "Some designers are more like stylists," his friend Neil Tennant, of the pop band Pet Shop Boys, told me. " 'Heh-heh, they're doing pirates.' Or 'disco New York.' Hedi is one of those people who create a world."

Hedi's world is well edited and diligently curated, with the man himself at the center of it. You might say, although he wouldn't, that he's sort of a cross between Martha Stewart (everything just so) and Andy Warhol (anything's possible). He is reticent and shy, and his pared-down approach to the presentation of himself applies also to the presentation of his work. He will not talk about a show beforehand, or even about what ideas or motifs are occupying his mind at the time, as they may relate to the clothes. He allows almost no one to visit his atelier, on Rue Francois 1er, in Paris. He doesn't like to talk about a show when it's over, either. He says that he can easily articulate what he is up to--he just prefers not to.

Fashion people talk for him. They describe his clothes as "modern," "cerebral," even "futuristic." What such windy accolades reveal about a jacket is hard to say. Slimane also takes photographs, and designs furniture, and dabbles in architecture and graphic design, and his prevailing aesthetic is sleek and spare, but the clothes themselves are not merely minimal. They turn the sincere but desultory magpie style of a teen-age boy into high fashion, by means of the materials, proportions, and craftsmanship of couture. As a result, the clothes are a little challenging, as women's clothes are.

Slimane's menswear lines have drawn on the sartorial style of various movements in rock music, chief among them the recent revival of British guitar rock, which in turn harks back to the punk, glam, and post-punk eras of the seventies and early eighties. In turn, the bands that inspire him end up wearing his clothes: newer acts like Razorlight and Franz Ferdinand, mid-careerists like the White Stripes and Beck, and old-timers like Bowie and Jagger, who have become friends as well as clients.

Another hero of Slimane's youth was Paul Simonon, of the Clash. When the Clash was admitted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 2003, Slimane had Dior send Simonon a couple of suits; he wore one of them to the induction ceremony. Simonon is an adherent of the idea that, as he put it, "you can't have a situation where the audience dresses better than the group." Soon afterward, Slimane went to Simonon's studio, to photograph his bass guitar. They got on well. "I like narrow trousers," Simonon explained. "I don't like flares."