Alexis Mabille was in a daywear mood this season. That's not his natural temperament: At heart, he is a fantasist, a designer who likes to decorate the hell out of his clothes—an approach that usually makes more sense for cocktail frocks than it does the kind of items women wear on repeat in the sunlit hours. Pre-Fall found Mabille constraining that decorative impulse, to a degree. Riffing on the idea of an arty girl, with a taste for both Impressionist florals and Constructivist geometry, he worked mainly in a neutral palette of black, gray, and navy, with occasional shots of lurid violet, and emphasized workhorse pieces such as shirtdresses and trim skirts and trousers. This collection didn't amount to a realistic wardrobe, exactly—the skirts were too short for that, and Mabille's tendency to cut an asymmetric hem or drape a faux scarf over a printed blouse or go for a tonal stripe when a plainer fabric would do kept otherwise straightforward pieces from looking like staples. The instinct there wasn't wrong, as the designer was obviously working to create a sense of "specialness," but his execution often read as affected. You could extract a good number of nice items here—the bow-collar shirts and little silk wrap dresses had an insouciant, très Parisienne chic, for example—but otherwise, there was an overabundance of detail.
