Though at the haute couture spring-summer 2015 fashion week floral prints came into vogue and found their way into all the collections, the flowers for Alexis Mabille are not a passing trend but a constant source of inspiration.
From season to season the designer replays in different ways the theme of a woman-flower: from delicate and fragile as a spring snowdrop to powerful and prickly as a tea-rose.
This time Alexis turned to the work of Charles Baudelaire’s contemporary, French writer Albert Samena, one poem of which begins with the line “There are strange evenings when flowers have a soul”.
Revived souls of flowers at Mabille’s show materialized in a series of bright colored bustier dresses, variations of kimono and pant suit, among which I was surprised to find a new for the designer “shocking pink”, “borrowed” from a patented palette of eccentric Schiaparelli.
Large poppies decorating several outfits were, in my opinion, slightly bigger than should be. Inverted from the back to the chest corset lacing on the bustier dress with a front slit on the skirt looked original, but sequins with which the dress was embroidered may have been superfluous. While the fashion house’s signature Bow on the final dress almost hid the girl herself.
Let us hope that in the next season Alexis finds inspiration in a more sophisticated flower than poppy, which soul, coming into life on this evening show in Paris, seemed a bit rough for an elegant Parisian couturier that, no doubt, Alexis Mabille is. If, of course, the point is indeed in a poppy.
Photo credits: Alexis Mabille / Piero Biasion