Azzedine Alaïa had a philosophy about preservation. “A dress holds three memories,” he would say. “The memory of the couturier who made it, the atelier that realized it, and the woman who wore it.”

For nearly 40 years , Alaïa quietly assembled what is considered the largest private fashion archive on record: some 20,000 pieces, acquired from 1968 until his death in 2017. That he collected around 600 Christian Dior designs—most by Dior himself—reflected his lifelong interest in the couturier’s dresses, once commenting that they seemed to “stand up all by themselves.”

Opening tomorrow at La Galerie Dior in Paris, “Alaïa’s Dior Collection” is essentially the story of how one couturier meticulously preserved the heritage of another. Of the 140 pieces on display, 101 are loans from the Fo

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