Some ideas hover in the fashion ether in a given season, getting twisted and tweaked by designers across the board. Safe to say, Alexis Mabille s campy Scottish theme isn t one of them.
In seasons past, Mabille has shown menswear so replete with feminine totems and icons—especially the bows with which he festoons both his men s and his women s collections—that it often felt scarcely like menswear at all. The rough-and-tumble Scotch brought out a slightly more masculine side of him; maybe that s what he meant when he opened the show with the assertive "Choose Life" monologue from Trainspotting on the soundtrack.
Even so, cuteness persisted. The dominant pant was a skinny jean that laced all the way up the leg like a corset. Wouldn t try to sausage Begbie into a pair of those. Forget about gilted brocade pants and tulle tees sequined with Mabille-ified whiskey logos. Fabric play led the designer down some potentially interesting avenues, like a loden overcoat that drew its peculiar sheen from a mixture of velvet and neoprene. But overall, the collection s reliance on whimsy threatened to stifle it.
