Azzedine Alaïa: A designer who is a craftsman, an engineer and a sculptor

I think of fashion as a verb with Alaïa, because the man works on every prototype, devises every fabric, supervises every fitting

Towering talent: Azzedine Alaïa frequently hosts dinner parties in Paris (Reuters)

At the end of fashion month, generally, you can't think of anything worse than seeing more fashion. So murmured the huddled masses, clustering around the doorway of 7 Rue de Moussy, for Azzedine Alaïa's… um… fashion show? But the phrase that never needed to be said, in any instance, was "except for Azzedine". He showed his spring/summer 2016 show on Sunday, four days after everyone else. The international fashion press had left the city – myself included. But I went back, because Alaïa matters more than most.

I don't think of Alaïa as a fashion designer: it's a convenient term to describe someone who works in clothing, but Alaïa is a craftsman, meets engineer, meets sculptor (a show of his clothes, Couture/Sculpture, is about to close in Rome). Try saying that fast – fashion designer is the easiest, especially as, ultimately, Alaïa makes clothes.

How connected are clothes with "fashion" though, and its relentless and ever-changing idea of newness? That's what people lust after, if you listen to luxury company CEOs, who are obsessed with constantly churning stock. "There is no difference," Alaïa once told me, about his notion of seasons. "There is an evolution in my work, but nothing is broken between two steps." The phrase often used to describe Alaïa is "timeless", because a dress you bought 20 years ago could be worn today.

I think of fashion as a verb with Alaïa, because the man works on every prototype, devises every fabric, supervises every fitting. He really fashions his fashions, like quite no-one else. The nuts-and-bolts of his spring/summer 2016 show, to me, was about making fabric stand away from the body. How are you going to do that? With ruffles and flounces and knits that pucker fabric up like three-dimensional broiderie Anglaise, via other slightly stiffer knits that make dresses form firm – but, importantly, not immovable – shapes. There was a lot of fringe, to animate, and I loved a series of dresses and shirts with schlag-y thick undulating frills, each a finger deep, like royal icing. Yet it was never stand-offish. You could always relate to these clothes. My favourite was a crisp white shirt and a mid-calf black skirt, because they were relatable. Everything was. It was real meat-and-potatoes fashion: you could easily imagine everything in people's wardrobes.

Azzedine Alaïa frequently hosts dinner parties in his Paris atelier, where he staged this show. He serves great food. Maybe he's less of a fashion designer, and more a chef? Great recipes, after all, are just tweaked into variants over time. They're rarely thrown out and started again from scratch. So we come, each season, to see what Alaïa is cooking up. There was much to chew over in this collection, plenty to digest. It was all delicious. It always is. Alaïa is a wonderful chef.