Couture Designer Norman Mabire-Larguier Shares Christian Dior’s Birthplace

For Paris-based Norman Mabire-Larguier, couture isn’t about grand displays and endless catwalks — it’s about the intimacy of a relationship forged through conversations and cloth.

Hence a quiet off-schedule cocktail debut at Les Ateliers de Paris, where he began a two-year residency earlier this year, to ease guests into a world of chrysalid-like silhouettes that are austere yet sensual and have only the most tenuous tether to gender.

What Mabire-Larguier seeks is to midwife new lines from the intersection of the human form and the sartorial architectures that encase it, particularly classic tailored outerwear, by skewing proportions and positions.

He works entirely in black, for “a radical reduction to the essential” in his eyes, but it’s by no means a restrictive choice.

He uses wools that seem to absorb the color into their surface, sequins that seem to sparkle and others that create an almost liquid reflection, and silk organza that turns pleatings and even seams into graphic effects on the skin. “Black isn’t just black, it’s about how to work light with black,” he said.

Taking the couture road was “about developing this space-time that can’t exist in ready-to-wear, where it would have no reality,” he said.

Notions of abstraction and a surreal touch spring forth from a longline dress where padded shoulders have been dropped to become basques that frame the hips, or a fitted jacket remade back-to-front that offers a cheeky display.

Such experiments helped the 27-year-old make a remarked debut following his graduation from Geneva’s Haute École d’Art et de Design. There was a Best Overall Collection Award at the 2022 edition of the Moda Portugal emerging talent showcase and a subsequent collaboration with French catalogue retailer La Redoute. A spot among the finalists of the 38th edition of the International Festival of Fashion, Photography and Accessories—Hyères followed in 2023.

It’s a path that began in Granville, the Normandy town best known as the hometown of Christian Dior and where Mabire-Larguier was born.

Yet beyond this geographic coincidence and their now-shared profession, don’t expect to hear of an awakening sparked by feet dipped in the water features at Les Rhumbs, the Dior family villa or an origin story that somehow connects the HEAD graduate to his illustrious forebearer.

“Sorry, the myth won’t be complete,” Mabire-Larguier quipped at a preview. His calling took root in “that moment where you’re looking for yourself” as a young person.

“Garments take on meaning in the construction of your own identity and [that] quest,” he explained. “It’s that search for identity, the relationship to the self and to others that goes through clothes that crystallized to the extreme in my approach and is my current motivation.”

Cutting his teeth in the design studio at Ateliers Grandis, a Normandy-based manufacturer of luxury ready-to-wear with more than 30 years of experience working for France’s top luxury houses, triggered Mabire-Larguier’s curiosity for patternmaking and design.

A bachelor’s degree in styling and design from Brussels’ La Cambre Mode(s) and after internships at Chloé, Hermès and Saint Laurent, he decided to enroll at HEAD.

That’s where the foundation for the Normanmabirelarguier label started to fall into place.

His graduate collection, in particular, began crystalizing “this research through shape of a way to give form to [his] interior world.”

“It was giving form to this indescribable queer experience, to emotions I wasn’t able to express otherwise and transmitting them when the garment is worn,” he added.

In Hyères, he showed male bodies encased and sometimes constrained by his chiseled tailored gowns and deceptively supple draping. If the lineup he is presenting this week during Paris couture applies this to female proportions, it isn’t that he is changing tack and gendering his work — or clientele.

“I always say that I don’t work for a [particular] gender, I work for a body,” he said. “Whether masculine or feminine, what will matter is [measurements] of the bust, of the waist.”

That’s also why he works with measurements matching a French size 38, about a U.S. 6, rather than the usual-in-couture size 34, or size 0.

“That [a size 34] has no reality and for me, it’s important to work on reality and create for a client who may come and try these pieces,” he said. “I took the measurements of plenty of stars from the U.S. or the Asia-Pacific region, plus a few clients and the average is that size 38 I’m working with.”

All this is why his next effort — already on the cards for the summer of next year — or even subsequent ones won’t necessarily appear on a runway. One-to-one appointments are where superlative details such as silk organza pleated vertically and horizontally, developed through his longstanding relationship with Chanel-owned specialist pleater Lognon, shine best. But it also is a way for Mabire-Larguier to telegraph a desire to keep his creative wings free.

“This global project is also a way to extract [myself] from the imposed structures of the industry, where I may not find my place,” he said. “It’s about finding a space that would be mine and wouldn’t obey to injunctions of the industry in terms of seasonality, structure and [distribution] model, which don’t allow room to have something new to say. That can only come from a radical point of view.”