TINY LITTLE BOWS

at maureen disini, tulles are dotted, and shoulders are in knots.

The ruffled tiers of embroidered tulle flounced and bounced as they came.

For Maureen Disini’s first official foray into ready-to-wear (outside of her childrenswear and her noted retail collaborations with mall brands such as Plains and Prints and Mosaic), she leaned into the overt femininity and ease-of-wear that is her usual signature, but altogether distilled with an off-the-rack approach.

On her decision to pursue ready-to-wear, “We were invited by Fashion Exchange International to create an RTW line that best represents our aesthetic,” writes Maureen, “and although our training in Milan is bespoke pieces, we were up for the challenge. Our process in constructing the collection, surprisingly, had less work and we finished everything in about three weeks.” Her discipline is custom-made and there was no small triumph in preserving that sensibility here.

Let’s observe: pursuing her girlish-but-for-grownups aesthetic, Maureen chose to embellish with her signatures of tiny bows, larger-than-life bows (not that you could miss them), pearl-encrusted tulles and refined laces. There were dots everywhere; be it point d’esprit ruffles cut into a suspended frock or pearl-encrusted tulles in shirred waterfall tiers.

Elsewhere, there was a subtle nod, too, toward a mid-western motif. You saw it in the saloon-skirt style mini dresses (and maxi too, toward the end) detailed with a flounced bib. Also in the cinched guipure frocks with dropped peplums. It was subtle, and according to Maureen altogether unintended (“I just wanted to make sure there was bounce when the models strut the runway,” she writes) — but the imagined hints of a “glamorous cowgirl goes to the ball” only added to the whole.

A midnight blue velvet gown, cut in her staple tiers and adorned with a knotted bow on the shoulder, felt like a promise of newness for Maureen Disini. “It was my favorite piece,” she shares. “What excited me about it was the play on texture. I never realized that velvet worked for us!”

It did, and it moved beautifully.