Alexis Mabille has a tendency to overplay his hand. On the runway, his clothes are styled to the hilt. But this season, he showed by appointment in his Galerie Vivienne boutique, one of two shops he's opened in Paris in the last year. "We show it in the boutique to show it how it really is," he said, on a break from preparing his couture show. How is it, really? The short of it is there's no stripping Mabille of Mabille. (Nor, it seems, of convincing him that not all men are as fond of bows as he is.) But the quieter atmosphere did at least allow the designer's strengths to come to the fore. If his multicolored leopard jacquard suit, multi-fabric cowboy shirts, and tailcoats were a bit much, the knits and shirts quietly embroidered with LEFT and RIGHT on the arms offered a more palatable dose of cute.
