Alexis Mabille: SS25 Haute Couture

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

For his SS25 haute couture collection, the ever-amorphous Alexis Mabille took a simple concept, a group of friends, and made of it an aesthetic Pantheon. Presenting a showroom and look book this season instead of a runway, Mabille selected an intergenerational and international cohort of creatives – the American “Queen of Burlesque” Dita Von Teese; the French ballet performer Marie-Agnès Gillot; the veteran German photographer Ellen von Unwerth – and doused them in artisanal decadence, resplendent in ruffles, feathers, sequins, and pearls.

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

Dresses bent into avant-garde, almost dystopian shapes. Structural coats and collars rippled and undulated to birth unexpected patterns and accents, adding a Schiaparellian dimension to the brand’s designs. But in other places garments were subdued and svelte, reimagining and re-allegorising Mabille’s established visual lexicon and language. This came most deftly in his exploration of his signature motif, the papillon nœud (literally a “butterfly knot”, though usually translated far less romantically into English as a “bowtie”), which now took on exaggerated and exuberant proportions as cinches or details, resembling almost gigantesque megafauna engineered out of the Carboniferous period.

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

The result was an expansive collection of impressive diversity, each look intended to reflect the individual personalities of their wearers. Von Teese’s look was thus fittingly classic – a black, bustier sheath dress corseted playfully at the waist, a blend of old-world burlesque and contemporary couture. Von Unwerth wore a sensible and stark jacket and trousers, albeit detailed with titillating pleats and drapes that gave the ensemble the effect of perpetual motion, an Alexis Mabille flair. And Gillot was adorned in a flowing ombré dress, its own movements graceful and dance-like as if taking on an onstage life of its own. With now some twenty plus years in fashion design, spanning menswear, womenswear, and haute couture and working under some of the industry’s most revered names (John Galliano at Dior, Hedi Slimane), Mabille is one of Paris’s most tenured sartorial minds. Somehow, though, his genius and attention to detail still continue to amaze.

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)