Pieter Mulier

Pieter Mulier is a Belgian designer and trained architect whose career developed through long studio collaboration with Raf Simons. He held senior design and studio roles across Jil Sander, Christian Dior and Calvin Klein, becoming known for translating broad creative direction into precise collection systems. In February 2021 he was appointed the first creative director of Alaïa after Azzedine Alaïa’s death and the house’s four-year studio-led transition.

At Alaïa, Mulier established a biannual Winter Spring and Summer Fall calendar, presented collections in domestic, architectural and institutional settings, and expanded the commercial weight of footwear and leather goods. La Ballerine and Le Teckel became key product lines, while runway work continued to centre on knit, drape, suspension and the relation between structure and the body.

Mulier’s tenure ended with Summer Fall 2026, presented on 4 March 2026 at the former Fondation Cartier building in Paris. He became chief creative officer of Versace on 1 July 2026. The move followed a five-year Alaïa period in which the house grew substantially while retaining an atelier-led approach to ready-to-wear.

Mulier works from construction and physical testing. His architectural training appears in circular cutting, bias drape, torsion and suspended forms, while garments are developed three-dimensionally with the atelier instead of being treated as illustrations translated after the fact. At Alaïa, this provided a credible point of contact with the founder’s bâtisseur method without requiring literal archival quotation.

The collections repeatedly imposed a material or spatial constraint. Summer Fall 2024 transformed a single merino yarn into surfaces resembling several fabric types; Winter Spring 2025 used the Guggenheim’s spiral as both setting and structural prompt; the final Summer Fall 2026 collection reduced the vocabulary to close-cut dresses, draped viscose, leather and raw-edged wool.

His authorship also foregrounds the studio. The final Alaïa presentation incorporated Keizo Kitajima’s portraits of the house team, making collective labour visible within the show environment. Product design followed the same balance of clarity and use: highly recognisable accessory shapes were engineered as functional objects rather than detached logos.