I do things without dcollet

This is not to say that Elbaz's work is more moderately priced than Ford's-or than any other high-fashion designer's, for that matter. On the contrary. Many top designers today offer "diffusion," or secondary, lines at lower prices, which are crafted to maintain some of the primary collection's Latex Catsuits mystique while moving product. Marc Jacobs has Marc by Marc Jacobs; Alexander McQueen has McQ; Vera Wang has both her less expensive Vera Wang Lavender Label and the downright cheap Simply Vera line, at Kohl's stores. Alber Elbaz does not engage in this kind of behavior. "I have a problem to do a collection that is a secondary line," he said that morning at the Carlyle. "I mean, you don't want to be the stepsister. You want to be Cinderella. Show me one girl who wants to be the stepsister."

"I do things without décolleté, nothing is transparent," Elbaz said. "I am overweight, so I am very, very aware of what to show and what not to show, and I am sure there is a huge link with being an overweight designer and the work I do. My fantasy is to be skinny, you see? I bring that fantasy into the lightness-I take off the corset and I bring comfort and all these things that I don't have. What I bring is everything that I don't have. This is the fantasy. This is the concierge that goes home."

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Elbaz assumed his post after Shaw-Lan Wang, a Chinese publishing magnate who bought a controlling interest in Lanvin in 2001, requested that he "please wake the sleeping beauty." She wanted him to take up the mantle of Jeanne Lanvin and make the company a player in the luxury market-as it had been at the Latex Leggings beginning of the last century. "When I met Alber, I felt he is talented," Wang told me. "In ten minutes, we decided to work together."

Jeanne Lanvin, the oldest of eleven children, was born in 1867, sixteen years before Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel, who came to be seen as the iconic "New Woman" of the twentieth century. Set next to Coco Chanel, "Lanvin represents an equally compelling, if less lurid, example of the self-made professional, a woman creative and entrepreneurial in equal measure," Harold Koda, the curator-in-charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has written.

No, the difference is that Elbaz's brand of luxury is more sedate, less ferociously hip than Ford's was. Elbaz does not want to define trends. He wants his designs to be timeless. "To buy Lanvin is to invest in future vintage" is how the Web site for the haute Manhattan boutique Kirna Zabête puts it. Elbaz detests the idea of an "It" bag; he thinks that "there is nothing scarier than being 'the designer of the moment,' because the moment ends."

Elbaz talks a lot about creating "value," by which he does not mean a bargain. "I know that our clothes are very, very, very expensive," he said. "But they are expensive not because we will just put a price tag over them. At our atelier, I go downstairs and I see and I hear a silence when they work-it's almost like a laboratory. I know that most of the time you don't see it. Only when you wear it you understand it." For instance, he had figured out a way to make strapless dresses stay aloft while still remaining soft, but it was a discovery that had required substantial experimentation. "I'm taking out a lot of the corset that is like syoop," he said, making a sucking noise and holding in his cheeks. "I took all the bones out, and I stitch, and to get there, you know, it took me forever. It took me six or seven dresses to make one. And it's time and it's money and we are not doing it in offshore countries-we pay sixty-five-per-cent taxes in France! It is so much work. Doing a collection for me is almost like creating a vaccine. Once you create the one vaccine, then you can duplicate it for nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. But see if you can create it for nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, and the answer is no. In that sense, I have absolutely no problem with the prices. I don't think we do it just to do it."

When Elbaz designs a collection, or even an individual item, he starts with a "story." For example, a recent collection featured ribbons, and was, for him, "like the story of the ties between people, between generations." A new necklace made of resin and faux gems is, in Elbaz's imagination, "a collage of a broken brooch from your grandmother, a pearl from your husband, and something your daughter brought home from kindergarten." It is important to him that everything he makes has this kind of imaginary history, a Genesis myth. He believes this is what gives his creations their potent and mysterious oomph.