Read more about The Rising Star of Alexis Mabille in our magazine's earlier coverage of the designer.

Could you tell us about the collection you are showing in Women’s Fashion Week?
It is the Fall/Winter collection which I have shown in Paris in July, and it is all about La Fontaine. He was this writer in the 17th century who wrote poetry and text to speak about politics at that time, because it was absolutely forbidden to speak about politics directly with names. He was doing comparisons between important people and animals.

Each dress of the collection expresses an animal. The leopard, the monkey; [the collection] is very funny. It expresses how when a woman is wearing couture, she loves to be unique and to play a game in the meantime. Because when you wear an evening piece like that, it’s like being a chameleon. Even if it’s in your personality, it will be played up as the movement of your clothes creates a new attitude or a different way to be because you have a corset or a train or something like that. I really wanted to do this palette in between the game the women are playing with their clothes and La Fontaine.

So that’s why each woman is an animal for this collection. And I have the Frog at the end, ha ha!

Why did you decide to make the Frog, of all animals, the wedding dress?
In the Fables, the poetry by La Fontaine, the Frog wanted to be the biggest of all the animals. She became bigger and bigger, so big in order to be bigger than all the other animals that in the end she exploded. This one is not exploding, but the proportions are huge, with a very small bust and a huge, huge, huge dress. It was a big frog. It is a joke, because it is always fun for me even if the clothes are very precious and very well done, to play with the colours and even to push a bit on the side and to twist the spirit of the couture.

You have to be young because sometimes couture can be a bit old-fashioned in the way we work. The process of fittings and the long time it takes to get a couture dress, and even the embroidery and all the techniques we apply, are sometimes a bit old fashioned. So we need to (makes breaking sound) to twist it and make it a bit trendy.

Is your couture is always a bit playful?
Yeah of course, it has to be. Because it’s all about evening wear, many times. There are few clients for daily wear in couture. So clients, they want to get creativity from their couture. Some people feel they have to be serious to get creativity, but for me, I love to have fun while I’m doing it.

When you buy clothes, couture, and when you pay a very expensive price for a dress you want to be unique; and if you love materials, colours, if you really love graphics, couture is a very good way to twist it and to play with it. Even if it’s just a black dress, sometimes just with details in the back or just a sexy cut or just a button in the right place, it creates something specific.

Can you tell us what inspired your next collection?
I can’t tell you now, it’s a surprise! (laughs) It will be a very colourful collection, more colourful than this one. You will see. For couture I really keep it a secret because it is a question of emotion when you do a collection of couture, and the result is really in between the place, the music, the models and the dresses, and all of these interact to create an intense moment.

Where do you go to find your inspiration?
It’s from everywhere. Some designers are redoing a theme at first and after they refine it in a different way, but for me it’s more like doing clothing. So I draw a lot of different things, and after that I compose them together and I have new dresses and I am doing many things, so it’s more about cut, and shape and fabrics.

But inspiration can come from everywhere, like an exhibition, or it could be just things I have in my head; there is no requisite, in fact. I don’t look for inspiration because it could be anywhere.

You also have a unisex pret-a-porter line, why did you decide to make it unisex?
It started because I could not find interesting things for myself in the shops as I’m not very tall, and I’m thin, so I was buying at that time a lot of women’s clothes to get colourful pieces. At the same time a lot of women friends of mine were buying a lot of men’s shirts and jackets to wear. So I decided to do a sort of mix-and-match, giving all the fabric and colour possibilities of womenswear to menswear and all the techniques of menswear to womenswear.

It is very unisex but not androgynous. The idea is not to transform men into women and vice versa. It’s more like to play with the rules of the game with just a wardrobe of pants, shirts and jackets. The bowtie also comes from that because it is the accessory in the middle of the two wardrobes. The bowtie is in women’s history of fashion and also men’s, and it is perfectly unisex, which is why I decided to rework it. 

Did the bowtie catch you attention because it is the accessory in between men’s and women’s fashion?
Yeah it’s a nice accessory, and since my childhood I liked bowties, so I wore it often. It has become something very specific and part of my wardrobe. It is like my camellia if I was Chanel. Ha ha!

How did you get started in making haute couture?
I started with ready-to-wear, but every time we had very expensive pieces, because of the needlework and the metres and metres of fabric. There were many extreme pieces and that’s why we started to show the couture because we started getting proposals even for ready-to-wear.

We also had some clients coming in so we decided to split from ready-to-wear and to create a real couture collection since three seasons ago. It was officially a full couture collection only three seasons ago even though before we had couture pieces, they were not a full couture collection. 

Now it’s a collection of twenty pieces every season, with a lot of needlework and a lot of interesting materials and while working with a lot of artisans, and with the idea of expressing something different in couture. It is a way for me to be myself, to show what I have in my heart.

Couturier Alexis Mabille showcased his Fall/Winter 2011/2012 Haute Couture collection at Women's Fashion Week held at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. See more photos: //senatus.net/album/view/2559/