Chloé (Q1818)
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French fashion house created by Gaby Aghion
- Chloe
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Chloé |
French fashion house created by Gaby Aghion |
|
Statements
2023
creative director
2020
creative director
freelance designer
1997
creative director
1992
Few designer appointments of recent times have gone off with the bang that Chemena Kamali’s at Chloé has. Partly it’s her credentials: She worked at the label twice before landing the top job last year, and she’s German like Karl Lagerfeld, who himself had multiple stints at the French house and set its tone and aesthetic with a string of influential late ’70s collections.But it takes more than the kismet of shared biographies to resonate the way Chloé is today. What it really boils down to is Kamali’s feeling for it, and that in itself is a mysterious brew of intuition, hard work, guts, and, yes, even luck. Which is how you might describe the fortuitousness of Vice President Kamala Harris choosing her designs not once but twice at the Democratic National Convention last month, one in a shade called coconut brown—purely coincidence, the brand insisted at the time—that was tailor-made for all the meme generators on the campaign trail making content about Harris’s viral coconut-tree remarks.The media glare could’ve added to the pressure of putting on a second show. Sophomore collections can be more challenging than the first, especially when the debut has been a success but the shock of the new has started to wear off. Kamali demonstrated not a stitch of self-doubt with the clothes and accessories she showed today; at a preview she said, “It was a fun season. We had a good energy, because you felt how the first show was resonating and it gives you a lot of happiness. You then just want to give everyone more, you know? And we’re exploring other ideas, other sides of Chloé.”The collection was a confident evolution of her first outing, with more casual elements—like high-waist, flared jeans recalling Phoebe Philo’s for the brand circa spring 2004 and a pink flamingo bathing suit channeling the cheekiness of the Stella McCartney era—that may be easier access points for the brand than the ruffles and laces worn by the celebrities and models in the front row today. On that note, the little kitten-heel jelly sandals will also be a popular hit.Like Kamali’s first, this collection was built on her intimate understanding of Chloé’s history. Photos of Lagerfeld-designed collections were pinned to the mood board in her studio. Two of her most inspired lifts were the waist shapers of spring ’77 and the lace bloomers of spring ’78. Both have the potential to reshape how young women think about sexy dressing in 2025.
Jackets—in sturdy workwear cotton, soft suede, and leather and all built with generous gathers along their strong shoulder lines—gave the sensual lightness of these pieces some ballast, maybe just a shade too much.Freshness and lightness are what make Chloé what it is, and Kamali has an assured hand with both. The floral-bouquet-print dresses in cascades of ruffled chiffon, shorter in front and longer in back, caught the air beautifully as they made their way down the runway. Chloé’s It girls and perhaps even other women, less prone to flowers and frills, are counting the days until next summer. They look like a dream to wear.
26 September 2024
In Chemena Kamali, Chloé has an ideal connector between the past and present of the house—and a creative director who is putting her considerable technical know-how into product. Her research and development for the spring 2025 collection made eye-opening viewing. “There are all these stories to explore that haven’t really been told yet that are part of our history,” she said. This time her mood-board was covered with images of “the Art Deco years of Karl in the 1970s. He furnished the entire apartment he lived in, in Saint Germain, as this Deco masterpiece—everything was in black and gold, and white, cream and gold, and he used to lend it toVogueand others for shoots. Guy Bourdin, Helmut Newton, David Bailey, and Deborah Turbeville all shot there.”In one particular 1975 ItalianVoguephotograph, David Bailey captured two girls kicking back on a shell-shaped sofa, bedecked in the glam-bohemian Chloé collection Kamali identified from pictures in the archive. “All these opulent, decadent gold lamés, brocades, fil coupés, and jacquards!” she exclaimed. Hence, the billowing, floating volumes, off-the shoulder dresses, balloon-sleeved blouses, and square-necked smocks in diaphanous coin-dot lamé and swirling, pleated metallic florals. “It’s more of an eveningwear interpretation of the last show.”Mixed in there were a fake fur coat, jacket, and pants. You can’t make it out in the lookbook image, but the neat, rounded ‘bump’ shoulderline on the jacket tells its own story of the precision of Kamali’s attention to structure and fit. It’s a detail applied across the tailoring—it turns up nicely in peacoats and blazers too. In the same picture are the boxer-ballet shoe hybrid sneakers Chloé is launching this season. “I wanted something that was soft, feminine, comfortable,” Kamali laughed. “And they had to be real. All the women in the office have been test-wearing them.” Collaged from a myriad soft pastel colors in hi-top and low versions, they look like a Chloé hit in the making.She had another surprise up her sleeve. The second half of her archive research was aroundL’Amour,an Andy Warhol film, released in 1972, which was also shot at Lagerfeld’s Deco apartment. “And so there was the whole New York Factory crew that came to Paris. They stayed at Karl’s apartment and had these epic legendary nights at Café de Flore.
” Studying the pictures, Kamali transferred traces of New York style with a slightly earlier late-’60s “eclectic” vibe: high-waist jeans, body-hugging t-shirts, and a tiny pink sweater, an Edie Sedgwick citrine baby doll dress, and a fringed leather Western jacket.Kamali tied all of these themes together with the accessories: tasseled metallic belts, strings of pendants, fringed bags, ‘Musketeer’ boots, camera bags with straps made from jewelry chains. Pick it all apart—as Kamali says she wants to encourage women to do in Chloé’s stores—and there’s something for almost every occasion and fashion personality. “I want it to feel like someone’s wardrobe, their closet to pull from every day,” she says. So thoroughly sorted-out is her version of Chloé that it’s hard to believe that Kamali has only one runway show under her belt. With the next collection just around the corner, she’s off to a flying start.
11 June 2024
“It needs to feel sincere, real, and functional.” On a spring morning in Paris last week, Chemena Kamali was introducing the ethos of the first collection she designed for Chloé, which was pre-fall 2024. Sort of back-to-front, it’s now being made public two months after her enthusiastically-applauded debut runway show for fall. There’s no accounting for the quirks of fashion schedules, but the logic of this one makes sense: It’s near the impending first Kamali-designed delivery; our first chance for a close examination of what we can get our hands on soon.She was walking the talk, dressed in a pair of high-waisted wide-denims, an epauletted navy silk crepe blouse, and a string of fine gold pendants, with a metallic snake belt looped around her jeans. “I really was thinking a lot about the Chloé wardrobe, what it should consist of, just, quite frankly, why do I want to wear it? What do I think is important to have in terms of essential pieces, things that go well with other silhouettes that you have at home already?” In the showroom on the Rue de la Baume, sunlight was streaming in from balconies over the street as she strolled over to a board pinned with the photos you see here.The similarities between the creative director’s own style and that of the tousled long-haired models in her pre-fall lookbook (not to mention the Paris balcony setting) are almost as one. That’s the advantage of female-led design in a house devoted to translating women’s instincts into action, of course—plus, the layers and nuances of familiarity with the house history and iconography that Kamali is bringing with her. Her ‘mood’ and image-making—the Chloé It-Girl for the 2020s—are relatable and referenced on-point. It’s the balance of carefree romance and pragmatism that’s run through the house since Karl Lagerfeld’s tenures in the ’70s, ’80s, and late ’90s; what Stella McCartney, Phoebe Philo, and Hannah McGibbon ignited in the aughts: Kamali has no need to study this. The spirit is at her fingertips—the balcony scene, for example, she said, is an echo of a Lagerfeld for Chloé advertising shoot from some time in the ’80s.But brands these days often market the glow of campaign imagery, and leave it at that. As caught as your eye may be, that still leaves a customer wondering what you’ll actually find in stores. Well, as evidenced by the clothes and accessories that she’d lined up on rails in coherent looks, Kamali is not going to allow Chloé to be one of those situations.
She’s worked through the possibilities of how x will go with y and z, as well as a, b, and c. How items cross-translate into the formal informality that can function for work, celebrations, dinners, commutes, and unpredictable weather. Where, for example, would you think to go to find something to wear to a wedding or a funeral, without having to buy an expensive one-wear thing that doesn’t adapt to anything else in life?
22 April 2024
Could there be a better, more qualified person to appoint at Chloé than Chemena Kamali? The energy she brought to her debut show for the label—all boho ruffles, slick outerwear and tons of accessories—was testament to the fact that this, in fact, is the third time she’s been at the house. (Read Mark Holgate’scomprehensiveVogueinterviewwith her.)Kamali knows the history of the brand inside out, and indeed worked there as a Chloé-obsessed junior designer in the noughties, and then again under Clare Waight Keller. Nobody knows better than Kamali the spontaneous feeling of It-ness that belongs to the female-centric Chloé philosophy; a power recharged through so many generations since the house was founded in the 1950s by the Jewish- Egyptian emigré Gaby Aghion as an unstuffy ready-to-wear antidote to Parisian haute couture.Fall was called the ‘Intuition’ collection. “You know, it’s how it makes you feel and how you want to feel,” said Kamali at a preview. “I think there’s this connection where today as a woman you need to be able to follow your intuition and be yourself. It’s very much about an intuitive way of dressing, about lightness, movement, fluidity and emotion. I also, love the power of nostalgia; where you go backwards, you go forwards—you also think of today and what women want to wear now.”Kamali’s ‘homecoming’ show was deeply interconnected with Karl Lagerfeld’s 1970s, since she shares his German-in-Paris identity. Look three, a brilliant white caped scalloped-edged blouse, knotted in front, with a pair of cool black hipster boot-cut flares and kitten-heel clogs almost read as her top-to-toe design manifesto. “We did that with a true dedication, an homage to the late ’70s Karl years, especially those between 1977 and 1979,” she revealed. “In 1977, he did this collection with re-embroidered lace and broderie anglaise—his ‘Musketeers’ collection.”There were at least two people in the audience who’d have got that reference- Jerry Hall and Pat Cleveland, who modeled for Lagerfeld in the ’80s, and who were in the front row loudly sharing their reminiscences of shoots and parties with their respective daughters Georgia May Jagger and Anna Cleveland. Further along from them were Sienna Miller in one direction and Alexa Chung in the other—two British It-Girls of the early 2000s who summed up the fizzing femininity of the Phoebe Philo Chloé years, platform clogs, sexy denims, lingerie dresses, and all.
29 February 2024
“I see myself as a link in the chain.” Gabriela Hearst spoke these words—an affirmation of her position in the long succession of women designers at Chloé—a couple of days before her celebratory farewell at the house. That occasion, which concluded with Gabriela leading the dancing, with models, amongst the Mangueira Samba school of Brazil is already part of Chloé’s history.She had a lot to be happy about—starting with the clothes. Three years ago, when Hearst joined as creative director—right in the middle of the pandemic—few would’ve believed she could make ‘sustainable’ fashion look and feel as sophisticated as her flower-inspired spring collection. “It came from drawings I was doing back in January—poppies, orchids, calla lilies,” she said, of the dresses made from spiraling ruffled knit, draped suede the color of marguerite, and the metal-work frills holding up the shoulderlines of a couple of linen party dresses.As well as celebrating nature, her imprint on the other side of Chloé’s brand repertoire—the tailoring—was to style it as a sort of “cowboy-cowgirl” Uruguayan self-portrait, in coats with metal-tipped lapels, bandana lasso embroidery, leather pants, and western boots. “It’s like the sheriff’s in town,” she joked. “That’s really me!”Hearst can also be deservedly proud of her leadership as Chloé’s sheriff of sustainability. During her tenure, it became the first luxury house to achieve B-Corp certification. She made the knitted suede and recycled mesh Nama sneaker, with its distinctively crafty blanket-stitching a commercial hit. At every possible opportunity, she’s spoken about ethical action and progressive science-based solutions to the climate emergency. “I’m proud that when I came to Chloé, there was one person in sustainability. Now it’s a department of 12. I’m proud that with this collection, the workmanship is so amazing—and the fabrics in the wovens are 70% low-impact and in the knitwear 80%.”Outgoing, she ended with a typically educational, optimistic flourish. “We need clean abundant energy. I did a show which spoke about (nuclear) fusion a year ago—and in that one year there’ve been a lot of advances, and a major breakthrough last December. It’s going to save our asses, and it’s closer than we think.” And then, it was on with the dancing.
29 September 2023
Making fashion sustainable is above all an energy issue, which is why Gabriela Hearst spent her first two years at Chloé focusing on materials, from fiber to garment. There would be no cotton logo tees under her watch.For the spring 2024 pre-collection, the house’s collection notes cite “a more nuanced and abstract stance centering on notions of consciousness, circularity, and timelessness.” Those values, it adds, are expressed “holistically on an aesthetic and technical level.”True to her straight-shooting mien, Hearst puts it much more succinctly. “This collection is about the chicest garment mixing, but actually you’re looking at trash,” the creative director said, somewhat triumphantly, during a showroom Zoom from New York. “Knowing that it’s leftover trash makes me feel good.”Not that anything about this outing even whispers “leftovers.” Au contraire. Its jeans, the fruit of a collaboration with denim specialist Adriano Goldschmied, are made of a proprietary fabric in 87% post-consumer cotton and 13% hemp. And what appears to be denim isn’t necessarily so: a shearling collared jacket shown here with matching flares is made of suede.Hearst’s favorite category, knitwear, is another throughline. It crops up in an elegant, fringed ensemble, or in a Merino dress with tulip sleeves and a botanical guipure midriff that could make converts of the cut-out averse. Ribbed knits in lower-impact wool engineered for curves and ease of movement are finished at the seams with jewel-like chains, an element that returns on a black hourglass jacket or a wool coat. Some pieces, such as a wool jacquard cardigan with multi-colored threads, were produced in collaboration with the social enterprise Manos del Uruguay.For evening, the designer paid tribute to Karl Lagerfeld’s quarter-century tenure at Chloé, a preview of which appeared at the Met Gala last month. The custom column dress worn by Maude Apatow, in deadstock silk crepe with a hand-embroidered arrow motif, is reiterated here in a coat, a dress with swooping arrow in back, and bags, shoes, and jewelry. Not pictured here is another nod, a guitar dress based on the long version Hearst wore on the red carpet.Beyond those statement numbers was a deep, plush lineup of unapologetically chic, sharply cut clothes in neutral shades of ecru, black, and navy. Those show Hearst’s fluency in the kind of Thomas Crown–ian dressing that women everywhere have likely had trouble sourcing in recent years.
A black wool cape coat with nuggety gold buttons, a denim and shearling jacket, fur coats teased from shearling or a cropped chocolate leather jacket made solid cases for gimmick-free, long-term investment dressing.”[In fashion], people sometimes forget that we are providing a service, something that is beautiful and well made,” the designer observed. “Nobody really needs what we make.” When this collection hits stores, Chloé fans will beg to differ.
5 June 2023
Gabriela Hearst prefers to proselytize about “Climate success, not climate crisis.” She’s an expert on scientific progress (fusion energy), political initiatives (COP nature protection goals), pretty much a warrior on replacing bad fabrics (environmentally damaging) with the less nasty, and a long-term supporter of many NGOs. So convinced is she by the convergence of positive change and clever thinkers that she believes there’s a chance of a new Renaissance around the corner. “Because,” she said, “since the beginning when I started to think about these things, I always thought that it’s science and creatives and artists that will take us out of this mess.”What does this have to do with the collection she put on the Chloe runway? Every season Hearst foregrounds a different message, and this one was about the transformative good that happens (and of course she has the hard data on it) when women are in charge, of our bodies first, and then everything else. “This is already accounted for. So how do we do this in our design context?” She asked rhetorically. “I have to find a muse, and that is Artemisia Gentileschi, the Renaissance painter.”Viewers will seek in vain for the baroque costumes that might suggest. There was instead a lot of shearling and leather (the by-products of meat), fine-gauge lacy knits, gauzy minimalist-boho dresses and the ponchos which are both Chloe-archival DNA (this goes back to Phoebe Philo’s horsey moments), and part of Hearst’s Uruguayan ranch upbringing.What Hearst was actually talking about earlier were the vaguely medieval-inspired vertical strips of leather in yellow, black and white, and the harlequin pattern that emerged toward the end of the show. The leather tailoring techniques were so incredibly refined that the effects which might look like print are minutely sewn edge-to-edge; a detail only a customer could appreciate in a shop. “I like it that nothing is gimmicky. They’re not clothes for Instagram,” Hearst quipped. “I’m tired of working for Zuckerberg all the time—like, where’s my check?”Still, Hearst wanted to make her point on women’s empowerment as a force for good: in this case, for standing against war—a narrative side reference to the Old Testament story of Esther, which Gentileschi famously painted. The biblical heroine intervened to prevent the slaughter of the Israelites by a wrathful king. “Through love, she convinced him not to kill,” said Hearst.
She translated the story into vivid patchwork embroidery in the craft style of “Central America” on the only decorated, multicolored dress on the runway (“although it was produced in Europe.”) In general, though, Hearst’s collection made a point which came down on the side of this season’s argument for clothes over costume, as well as good practice over bad. Since shows have powered back, post-pandemic, environmental and social responsibility haven’t been spoken about anything as like as much as they were. Hearst is one designer guaranteed never to be a back-slider on that: with every step, she’s pushing towards that goal of climate success.
2 March 2023
The Chloé lookbook opens with a merino wool tank and maxi skirt accessorized with gold body chains that are a nod in the direction of Gabriela Hearst’s 17th century muse, the painter Artemisia Gentileschi. On a Zoom call last week, Hearst was talking up Gentileschi; both her artistry and her against-the-odds success (painting was not a typical woman’s profession 500 years ago) appealed to the designer. Also, “she did paintings of heroines,” Hearst said, adding that if Gentileschi had been born a man, we’d know more about her.Allusions to the baroque era are a throughline of the new collection. There are graceful trumpet sleeves on a knit dress, a demure lace-up bodice on a hemp and linen number, and quilted puffers shaped like doublets made from leather or recycled nylon. Decoratively speaking, the offering’s harlequin motifs on knit separates and the color-blocking of a leather slip dress and poncho-cape are linked to the same time period.But historicism isn’t really Hearst’s motivation. She quickly established her Chloé aesthetic after arriving at the Paris label two years ago. What drives her is the work she’s doing to produce fashion more sustainably, and if she can lift up women makers in the process, all the better. Among the brand’s partnerships with social enterprises are a new one with Madagascar’s Made For a Woman, the artisans of which have creations handwoven hats for the collection.A partnership with Teva has yielded a group of its familiar sport sandals made completely with recycled materials. And via an ongoing collaboration with the jeans legend Adriano Goldschmied, Hearst has developed a new wash that requires 80% less water than typical denim. Other jeans pieces have been made from post-consumer denim, “trash basically,” Hearst said. She’s as enterprising as ever.
5 December 2022
There’s a party in Chloé’s power plant and everyone is coming. This season, Gabriela Hearst dedicated her collection to the promotion of fusion: “It’s basically the energy of the stars and the universe,” she said during a preview, flanked by representatives from ITER as well as Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Helion—companies which are working on harnessing this benign source of energy through giant round devices known as tokamaks. They can’t be used to produce a fashion collection, but, as Hearst said, “Eventually they will, because we’ll need the energy to make clothes. Imagine that whatever is a coal plant now will be a fusion plant in the future. The future is close.”She arranged the seats of her show—set within a blacked-out Pavilion Vendôme—to mimic the circular shape of the tokamak and surrounded the structure with hoops hanging from the ceiling and laser lights that evoked an industrial rave. That feeling reverberated through a collection that served as a figurative ode to fusion power, adapting the curves of the tokamak into silhouettes and surface decoration that looked part power plant uniform and part retro warehouse party. “The most important thing you need to know is that this is a source of clean energy with very little waste. A glass of fusion fuel can power a house for approximately 800 years,” Hearst said.The rave kicked off at high speed with knitted dresses with cut-outs created from recycled cashmere and blazers constructed in linen, a favorite material of Hearst’s due to its pesticide-free harvesting method. They made for a soft opening before the mood turned decidedly industrial: dresses in foiled mesh or knitted to look like perforation, and outfits in head-to-toe certified European leather fit for a fancy factory worker. The shape of the tokamak was represented in round leather patches crocheted into a dress, and in the very curved sleeves of a leather dress with a heart-shaped décolletage. Circular lines for a circular fashion system.A series of utilitarian motorcycle outfits in leather Frankenstein’ed with lacing that looked like magnified stitching made for the collection’s strongest proposition for a “season piece”—something that will read as “Chloé” as Hearst’s signature recycled plastic trainers, which appeared elevated on platforms alongside metallic clogs for the discerning manual laborer.
A coat adapted the mechanics of the tokamak in metal fastenings, and recycled cotton that looked like denim was adorned with heavy-duty eyelets. There were disc-shaped leather sequins, and a dress towards the end latticed from metal rings that had been crocheted with multicolor yarns. If fusion is a complex phenomenon to comprehend, so was the construction of Hearst’s collection.Most seductive was a delectable black suit forged from wool from the designer’s ranch in Uruguay, which houses some 8,000 Merino sheep. Power-cut in a sculpturally slouchy silhouette, it was one of a few pieces in the collection labelled with a QR code that, when scanned by potential customers in-store, will tell you exactly where its material was sourced. Slick and statuesque, it served as a moment of serene sophistication in the hyper-sensory sea of lights and textures that was the Chloé show. But, as Hearst said, “It’s not as complicated as building a tokamak. Or plasma physics.”
29 September 2022
To create a responsible brand in the 2020s entails more than choosing sustainable materials and cutting down on manufacturing and shipping costs. As Gabriela Hearst sees it, building advocacy and awareness into the marketing plan is part of the process. At her fall show she took up the subject of rewilding. For resort, she launched into an energetic Zoom lesson in fusion.“The problems fashion has are the problems that all industries have,” she started. “The world’s energy supply is 85% from fossil fuels, and if we don’t eliminate that situation we’re really walking into suicide. All these alternate energy sources—wind power, solar panels—don’t have the capacity.” Fusion, Hearst explained, could make up the difference as we wean ourselves off of oil. “In a nutshell,” she said, “fusion is how stars are made. It’s the energy that moves the universe.”She promised “a much bigger experience of it,” at the Paris show in September. Here, the fusion lesson consisted of broderie anglaise and laser cut leather in the form of stars and a night sky palette of strictly black and white, save for a single red dress with a scoop neck and full poet sleeves. She credited Joel Cohen’s recent adaptation ofThe Tragedy of Macbethfor the corset shape of dresses accented with knotted leatherwork evocative of medieval chainmail, and leather jackets and vests patchwork paneled like armor.The novelties this season were twofold. First, she collaborated with Barbour, the British outerwear company renowned for its waxed jackets, on a trench with Chloé-ish ruffles details and on a poncho, a shape she has a soft spot for. The denim corset dress, duster coat, button-front vest, and a-line skirt are the results of a project Hearst dreamed up with the California jeans expert Adriano Goldschmeid. They’re composed of 87% recycled cotton and 13% hemp; that’s an earth-friendly equation.
6 June 2022
“We think about the climate crisis, we’re able to see the climate crisis,” Gabriela Hearst declared. “But now it’s time to start visualizing climate success. And there are many ways of doing it. Rewilding is one of them.”More than any other high-fashion designer, except for Stella McCartney, Hearst invites discussion, inspection, even, of how she sources her materials—both for her own brand in New York, and here at Chloé in Paris. Which meant that a fundamental divergence between the positions of these two climate-activist fashion designers opened up at the beginning of the show. Here there was leather. A lot of it. Not “vegan leather” or any of its fruit or mushroom substitutes, or its fossil fuel-derived polyester lookalikes (as used, variously, by McCartney), but actual glossy leather-leather. Made from the hides of cattle.“For me, leather is a by-product of the meat industry,” Hearst said in a preview. “So, as long as you know where it’s coming from, and you have traceability and it’s done in a proper way, you’re using waste.” Her leather comes from Italian suppliers, whose tanning processes are compliant with European environmental standards.Over to how the overture to the collection looked: strict, minimal, black, brown and yellowy-tan leather pieces, ranging from coats to shirts to narrow jeans—with an of-the-moment white tank tee—and a belted black dress with balloon sleeves. The show hewed between boy-tailored pant suits, fit-and-flare dresses, and Hearst’s characteristic affinity for ponchos and knitwear—and for searching out links with socially-responsible textile projects.The latest is her commissioning of the African-American Gee’s Bend women quilters of Alabama. The storied artist community used Chloé deadstock scraps to fashion blankets and the gilet layered over a coat worn as the finale by Amber Valletta.Back to Hearst’s primary resolve to message hopeful solutions in the face of climate anxiety. She’d sought out the advice of Isabella Tree, the British environmentalist who returned her farmland in Sussex to nature. Leaving it to its own devices—“Rewilding”—has scientifically proved how ecosystems, plants, insects, birds, and soil will start healing themselves of their own accord, in balance with the benefits brought by grazing animals. Hearst relates to that, through her own experience of being brought up on her mother’s ranch in Uruguay. “My mom’s place is full of wildlife, because she never overgrazes, so it’s regenerative,” she said.
“When people talk about regenerative agriculture, I know it firsthand.”On the runway, Hearst wanted to materialize the hope that damage can be reversed. She did it with recycled cashmere knitted sweaters and skirts. On the front were instarsia images of melted glaciers, arid and burning landscapes. On the reverse: pictures of green mountain ranges, forests and polar bears. If only humans can imagine that, she believes, we can make it happen.
3 March 2022
With her typical conversational blend of urgency and enthusiasm, Gabriela Hearst was rattling through the scorecard for her Chloé pre-fall collection. “Just because it’s not on the runway,” she said, “I’ve never thought it less of an opportunity to improve in whatever you’re doing.” The company has been measuring that progress since she arrived at the house. “To give you the exact facts, 70% of the product offer since I came in became lower impact. Compared to my first collection, (what) we did is up 40%.”Women who are living under a cloud of post-COP26 anxiety might take some cheer from how openly Hearst is tackling the environmental and social problems inflicted by the workings of the fashion industry. The way she speaks of it, implementing the changes that lie within her power is as much her purpose as the mission to dress women in Chloé clothes. “Empathy, collaboration, lower impact—the right values need to come to the forefront. Collectively we at Chloé are working toward weaving that into the DNA of the company.”The clarity of style she’s brought to the house has become completely visible four seasons in. It’s streamlined and slick, a grown-up boho look infused with classic Chloé-isms and her own handcrafted, macraméd, whipstitched energy. She’s carefully corralled all the legacies that women designers have imprinted on the brand for decades: the reputation for a boot-cut, ’70s-ish pantsuit that Stella McCartney laid down; the balloon-y broderie anglaise sleeves that Phoebe Philo played with; and Chloé founder Gaby Aghion’s scalloped edges and taste for pinkish orange, the color of the Egyptian desert of her childhood.Meanwhile Chloé’s horsey heritage is a natural for Hearst, who brings her own Uruguayan ranch upbringing to her feeling for caped coats, French-style riding boots, and the thick leather girth strap she’s turned into a belt. “I love this buckle that I found in the archive from Hannah MacGibbon’s time,” she said. “We oversized it.” It all looks a lot like Hearst herself: tall, strong silhouettes; a practical modern vigor; a touch of the hippie sophisticate.Yet the main imprint she’s stamping on Chloé is in becoming one of the very few luxury fashion creative directors—one other being, obviously, Stella McCartney—who are making it impossible to detach the conversation about pretty clothes from talking about what’s in them and how they are made.
Moving rapidly along the vectors of transparent reporting, partnerships with women’s employment projects, environmental certifications, Chloé’s freshly acquired B Corp status, and new membership in the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (which champions circularity)—and shining a light onto the multitude of fashion’s hidden processes—is a business that continually brings up more questions.
6 December 2021
There was a lovely moment of happenstance at the first Chloé show to gather a live audience together since you-know-when. There we were, sitting by the Seine, watching the girls walking along the Quai de la Tournelle in brilliant sunshine. A second audience of Parisian passersby wassur le pontto the right. And just at the very moment the finale began, a packed riverboat sailed past, full of accidental fashion show spectators waving and delighted on deck.Somehow, this all felt like a very Gabriela Hearst moment, because the practice of sharing and openness is her all over. “As cheesy as it sounds, this collection is about love,” she said in a preview. “It’s really about the love of so many things: the love of craft, the love of friendship, the love of fellow humans. I literally have to memorize the many different NGOs, because I am working with so many this season.”You get the free-flowing, unforced boho spirit of what Hearst is doing with Chloé from the 31 pictures of the show. What with its summer-holiday caftans, ponchos, lacy dresses, and smattering of boyish pantsuits, the collection is fully in the tradition of the free-spirited Chloé girl brand identity that has been passed down from hand to hand by a succession of women designers, from Stella McCartney and Phoebe Philo onward.What’s very different with Hearst is, first of all, the reduced number of looks in the shows: down to 31 from sometimes more than 50. And second, the meticulous and quite formidable way she’s bringing in changes in sourcing, the supply chain, traceability, and environmental and social responsibility to a major Paris fashion brand.All the information is documented in a Chloé press release and on its website: progress toward what all fashion houses ought to look like internally in this age of climate emergency. At points—when you consider how many women’s organizations and communities Chloé is benefiting through buying strategies around the world—it almost begins to seem possible that this work could even be marking a shift in the entire purpose of a luxury brand’s existence.One step in that direction is that the most exclusive level of Chloé luxury is now being launched as Chloé Craft—a group of products with a spiral logo, denoting, as Hearst puts it, “that only a human hand can make those pieces.
” In the spring collection, those hand skills were evidenced in pieces like the petal-pattern crocheted dress and the intricately knotted streamer-harnesses made of strips of leftover fabric from seasons before—techniques created by Akanjo, a social enterprise organization in Madagascar. The chunky seashell and macramé necklaces, as well as baskets that come labeled with the name of the person who wove them, also bear the spiral branding.Shifting the needle toward causing less environmental harm primarily comes in Hearst’s creditable insistence on fabric switching. For example, there’s more linen and less cotton involved in this collection. It’s used to chic effect in the cream pieces, including a generous, Hearst-signature trench coat with a cool heft and whipstitched leather edging. And, more surprisingly, in a great indigo blue pantsuit that at first sight seemed to be denim, but was in fact a beautifully soft, supple linen.Underfoot, as well as the eco-friendly Nama trainers launched this year, a new and delightfully multicolored deep-soled Chloé flip-flop was treading the Parisian riverside quai. In fact, all the pretty pastel layers pressed into the soles were once other flip-flops. “They’re from Ocean Sole, which I’ve been wanting to work with for a long time!” Hearst declared with glee. “It’s a Kenyan nonprofit that collects flip- flops from the ocean.”All the applause from the people of Paris, boat-trippers and fashion audience alike, was well deserved for the progress she’s pushing through.
30 September 2021
Under the creative vision of Gabriela Hearst, Chloé is becoming fashion’s embodiment of the age of awareness. Presenting her first resort collection for the brand on a video call from Paris, it was motivation over inspiration: “We’re here on a mission,” she said, listing the impressive measures the house is taking to make its collections sustainable. If you came for the romantic mood boards and the classic tales of trips to the archive, this wasn’t it. “I haven’t gone to the archive,” Hearst said. “I feel like I’ve loved Chloé for so long and I have this idea of what it looks like. It’s not that I don’t respect what’s been done in its history, but I want the representation of what Chloé means to me to come out first.”Instead, the collection was an accelerated exercise in what we might discover to be our post-pandemic fashion mindset: What you wear is only as good as its social and environmental footprint. “We can’t deny what we went through on a global scale. Things are going to be different,” she said, referring to a cataclysmic year that shifted our understanding of environmental impact and made companies like Chloé—already on a sustainable path before her arrival—look to eco-conscious figureheads like Hearst. “Each collection is an opportunity to do it better,” she said. “I already did the least sustainable thing you can do, which is to have three kids.”In spirit, her proposal was geared toward those kids: the next-generation mentality Hearst says can’t come quickly enough. “We need to move out of the way and let them take over. They’re wired in a different way. They have a different perception.” In design, the collection’s Chloé-revering bohemian pragmatism reached out to generations somewhat older. Puritan-ish dresses were constructed in circular deadstock denim—with no metal, laser treatment instead of water, and recycled wood buttons—scalloped leather, and deadstock broderie anglaise. Linen trench coats trimmed with embroidered white edges demonstrated how Hearst might see a classic wardrobe staple through the instinctive Chloé lens she talks about.Blanket coats and fringed hand-spun dresses riffed on the hippie-esque references we historically relate to an eco-friendly wardrobe—not one for a cliché, Hearst likened them to techno dance parties. “Rave against the machine,” she punned, showing off a matching multi-color debut Chloé sneaker defined by its great, big stitches, every component created from recycled material.
“I’m really attracted to product that feels handmade. I want to feel like a human worked on it.” She cited the Pre-Raphaelites and Arts and Crafts movement as loose sources of inspiration, comparing their artistic responses to the Industrial Revolution to what we’re experiencing today. As Hearst delves deeper into the sustainable achievements of her Chloé residency, she will no doubt find more space for her own artistic response to that changed world.
5 June 2021
Watching Gabriela Hearst’s first show for Chloé unfold was like seeing the child of two familiar people grow up before your eyes. Slowly, recognizable features from each set of genes morphed into one symbiosis that turned out quite attractive. (On paper it already seemed like it would, but like any lovechild, you can only really hope.) Hearst called her Chloé collection the “Aphrodite” to her own brand’s “Athena”: sensual and playful femininity versus a heroic and wise androgyny. While both were underpinned by Hearst’s signature earthy puritanism, her take on Chloé’s bourgeois bohemia was far more girly and kicky than the monastic modernism of her own brand.Seizing an opportunity only the current Paris curfew could create, Hearst filmed her models striding out of Brasserie Lipp—where Chloé’s late founder Gaby Aghion presented some of her earliest collections—and across the cobblestones of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. It was very postcard, but far fromEmily in Paris. On the contrary, this was a viable wardrobe for women created by a woman for a brand largely shaped by women, from Aghion herself to Phoebe Philo, Clare Waight Keller, Natacha Ramsay-Levi, and sustainable trailblazer Stella McCartney. Hearst is taking on a female-driven legacy in a time when male designers are suddenly fronting brands created by women.
3 March 2021
It’s already become the cliché question of the post-lockdown fashion weeks: Hoping there’s a vaccine coming, what will we want to wear after a year spent in confinement, face masks, and socially distanced spaces? For Natacha Ramsay-Levi, those questions triggered some far bigger ones: How does our wardrobe affect the way we move and behave in the public space? How does it impact our body language? She staged her Chloé show within the monumental courtyard of the Palais de Tokyo. On three massive screens, live footage captured her models making their way to the runway.Wearing the collection, they were scattered around the streets of the area engaging in normal situations. Some were strolling down the bank of the River Seine, others were seen crossing a street or chatting on the steps of a building. Eventually, they stepped into the imposing courtyard with a different purpose to their step, visibly adapting to new surroundings. “The idea was to pick them up within their own intimacy of real life,” Ramsay-Levi said, referring to the cameras’ zoom lenses. “It’s about showing something that’s more attentive, more spontaneous, and more intimate, and taking time to look at a woman and the way she moves and acts in a much more natural way. Rather than just say, ‘Okay, you should walk like this.’”Her point was to study, evaluate and define—for this new moment in time—the values of the everyday wardrobe Chloé provides for its customer. Since Ramsay-Levi joined the house in 2017, she has gradually been doing just that, editing and refining her expression to determine an idea of the essential. The answer to her questions this season clarified that approach to a further extent. “Things take time. We need to repeat things before we understand them. When I look at fashion, sometimes I only start to understand the point of view of a designer in the second or third season. I think it’s important to be committed to what you do,” she said.Her philosophy was reflected in a collection that largely built on elements introduced in previous seasons, and reduced them—in cut and decoration—to a sense of the universally desirable, and the more affordable, too. She loosened her Chloé silhouette, touching on the post-quarantine theme of comfort dressing, and toned down her embellishment in favor of a focus on colors.
Some cuts had been worked from the idea of squares—“after confinement I couldn’t do crazy things, so I became obsessed with squares”—while a collaboration with the estate of the late artist Corita Kent emblazoned pieces with joyful and hopeful slogans about the power of community.If it looked like a conscious business move, it’s because it was. “A question that was very strong in confinement was: How long does a product last?” Ramsay-Levi said. “And it’s not enough. Basically, until we can change that rhythm, it’s important for me to be able to say ‘for a while,’ and not change my mind all the time. As far as being business-driven, it’s about being truthful and consistent. Some products only last three months maximum in a boutique. If you keep arriving with something new that makes that outdated, I think that’s not valuable as a position.”
1 October 2020
The Chloé invitation came with a mini poster of a Rita Ackermann painting. The artist provided access to five additional pieces from the ’90s and ’00s at Natacha Ramsay-Levi’s request, and the designer used them as patches on the front and back of a button-down shirt, as a design on a blanket shawl (Leave Me Alone, 1995), and as an actual-size print for a flowing shirtdress. Golden totem sculptures by Marion Verboom decorated the runway, and Marianne Faithfull smokily read Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty” and other poems on the soundtrack. Still more women creatives joined the models on the catwalk. “It’s about a community of creative spirits,” Ramsay-Levi said at a preview of the collection. “Yes, clothes are great, but I love creative women.” They seemed to have a rub-off effect.In the five runway shows that preceded this one, Ramsay-Levi swung from girly to career girl. Today she found her sweet spot, hitting on all the Chloé essentials—the tailoring, the soft blouses, the romantic dresses—but infusing them with personal touches that made them special. Suits leaned ’70s, with easy flaring pants and rolled-sleeve jackets. Her blouses had delicately jeweled buttons and cuff links, and her romantic dresses were alternately inset with bands of crochet at the hem or decorated with enamel embroidery at their peekaboo necklines. The Rita Ackermann prints worked a charm too. Fashion-art collaborations don’t typically seem so effortless. This was a significant turnaround from the spareness of last season, and the desirability of the clothes put smiles on the faces of the retailers we bumped into out in the rain afterward.Jewelry is another one of the Chloé essentials. The little pins that were added in clusters to jacket lapels and pullover sweaters, the way you often see young women wear them, added to the overall sense of individuality. One of the pins read “girls forward,” which just about sums this collection up. “Chloé doesn’t stand for any one thing,” Ramsay-Levi said back in the showroom. “It’s an open identity, something for the woman who wears it to define.” Surrounded by her people, Ramsay-Levi put on her most confident Chloé show yet.
27 February 2020
Pre-fall is one of Natacha Ramsay-Levi’s favorite collections of the year. “It’s a chance to reaffirm what Chloé stands for, its essence as I see it. It’s more concentrated,” she explained during a recent showroom tour. In other words, she feels liberated from any need to spin far-out tales: the clothes are the story. Be they serene and relaxed, masculine and feminine, or straight-up romantic, they are “there to be worn, and for a long time,” the designer said.In the three years since she arrived at the house, Ramsay-Levi has figured out what she wants to say and how she wants to say it. To that end, she has defined a growing core of softly tailored, urban perennials that her base loves. The Chloé blouse is a constant,bien sûr, but the designer keeps it on the more compelling side of Parisian bourgeois by pairing it with flowing, high-slit culottes and a sharp jacket (this season in soft navy with tailored cuffs) and then grounding the whole look with ranger boots.Complementing such practical considerations were more directional pieces. A feminine shell and a camisole showered with Art Nouveau–inspired flowers were as pretty as could be. Eyelet blouses with flouncy cuffs brought a touch of girlishness to relaxed classics like chunky knits and slouchy pleated trousers. Sharp-eyed followers will recall this season’s floral print: the designer used it on benches for her show, and those, too, are slated to reappear season after season.It’s all part of Ramsay-Levi’s philosophy of reusing the resources she has and trying to strike a balance between constancy and fashion’s habit of newness. “Fashion is changing so fast. Even for me, sometimes I see a show and I don’t get it right away; I need time to digest things,” she explained. “There’s something unhealthy about the infinite circle of newness, so even if something we do isn’t a best seller, if I like it, sometimes I’ll bring it back again.” For that, Chloé fans are sure to thank her—now, and for seasons to come.
13 January 2020
“I’m thinking of it as chapter two for myself. I’ve tried a lot of different things; I thought, let’s simplify—be honest and true.” Spring 2020 is Natacha Ramsay-Levi’s fifth runway collection for Chloé. When a designer takes on her first creative director role, input comes from all sides; there can be a lot of different voices to deal with. Going forward, the plan for Ramsay-Levi is to listen only to her own. That has meant thinking hard about what Chloé is about and what the designer herself believes in.What she’s come up with is a more refined message, shedding the bold prints and much of the boho accessorizing of past seasons and resisting any urge to fuss over a silhouette. The new collection has a foundational order to it. Ramsay-Levi’s Chloé stands for a silk lavaliere shirt, for a suit that’s strong but not unfeminine, for a shirtdress with interesting volume, and for a knit that feels particularly French. In keeping with this point of view about practicality, the bags for the season are roomier and slouchier; in the case of the Daria style, the leather is even a touch weathered and broken in.Where earlier Ramsay-Levi might have avoided familiar Chloé-isms, like the particular shade of creamy peach associated with the brand since Karl Lagerfeld’s days, here she embraced them; the show ended with a pair of long, graceful pleated dresses in the color. The romance so closely associated with the label was in full blossom too, on a handful of micro-floral-print frocks. In one instance, she cut the dress’s sweetness by styling it unbuttoned over a silk bra and trousers. These were the most winning pieces in the collection, delicate like vintage treasures.Ramsay-Levi couldn’t resist a few message tees and the fashion gesture of layering silk boxers under shorts. But all in all, her aesthetic turn to the classic and mature dovetails smartly with the increasing sense that customers are interested in shopping more responsibly and looking for lasting investments that aren’t datable to a specific season. A timely evolution.
26 September 2019
You can spot a Chloé girl instantly by her patterned dress, sturdy boots, or monogram C bag. That’s a testament to the strength of Natacha Ramsay-Levi’s vision and the global relevance of her design signatures. Today, the Western fashion crowd traveled to Shanghai to take in the brand’s Resort 2020 show, which was staged on the rooftop of the Long Museum at sunset.The decision to put on a show for its Resort collection, and to set it against the hazy skies of China’s bustling metropolis, was made more than a year ago. Business was the draw, with the luxury market bigger than booming throughout Asia, but the city is a good fit with Ramsay-Levi’s sensibilities. A lover of Chinese cinema, she had compiled backstage dozens of stills from her favorite movies by Jia Zhangke, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Zhang Yimou, Bi Gan, and Lou Yi, as a de facto moodboard, and was beaming over the fact that one of her favorite actresses, Shu Qi, would be sitting front row. (The soundtrack toMillennium Mambo, Qi’s breakout film, scored Ramsay-Levi’s runway-debut Chloé collection, in 2017.)Another film,Three Times, by Hsiao-Hsien, informed Ramsay-Levi’s decision to explore China’s rich history, drawing on its empirical eras, its Art Deco period, and its contemporary buzz. The designer’s nods to Chinese culture were small but poignant, such as the side buttons on a floral dress that evoked a qipao, and two prominent flag-red looks. There were also tiny embroideries inspired by traditional Chinese handwork.Ramsay-Levi’s sense of cool—the layering of skirts over pants, the sneakers with skirts, and the piles of golden jewelry—meshes well with the Shanghainese culture. Worn by a majority Chinese cast of local models, the clothing took on a lively new dimension; if Chloé has long been the ur-brand for Parisian je ne sais quoi, it proved it could also be that for Shanghai’smiao bu ke yanon the runway tonight.But that’s enough about vibes. Not enough attention is paid to celebrating Ramsay-Levi’s skill as a designer. The dresses might be flippy and floaty, but Ramsay-Levi constructs them with the precision and rigor of a would-be couturier. Her best this season were the slips and smocks; they were as light as air—which is especially good for a hot Chinese summer—but still shapely. Voluminous, lacy skirts given structure by ribbon detailing also looked compelling paired with Ramsay-Levi’s tailoring.
(This season’s slouchy trousers might be hard to pull off IRL, but they were convincing on the runway.) If you caught a new hint of sexiness in these looks, especially the finale number with its catty sandal, you’re on right track. A tough womanliness came through this season more than ever.
5 June 2019
At Chloé today, postcards showcasing some of Karl Lagerfeld’s key collections for the house were placed on every seat as a tribute to the designer who passed away last week. On the back of each card were printed Lagerfeld’s comments about his work. He was a man of many words, and he designed at Chloé for 25 years, but something he said about an iconic 1975 collection resonated today. “The essence of modern dressing—unstructured, weightless, [and] totally feminine.”Four decades later, that notion sums up the Chloé aesthetic just about perfectly, and Natacha Ramsay-Levi nailed it this season, with an array of the kind of breezy but polished dresses that women have looked to Chloé for since Karl’s days. The orangish-red wrap style in a silk jacquard wallpaper pattern was extra charming with navy embroideredCs scalloping the edge of its skirt. Its sister dresses were mostly shorter, often with asymmetrical hems and volume through the shoulders and sleeves that transmitted a—yes—modern kind of ease. Ramsay-Levi sent them out with mid-heel boots (her boots from last Fall are everywhere at Paris Fashion Week) that accentuated the cool attitude.There was more going on here, however, than billowy dresses. Ramsay-Levi has made attenuated, sometimes quirky tailoring part of her vocabulary since she arrived at Chloé. Those horse-embroidered corduroys have also had a good run IRL. For Fall, her trouser silhouette was a utility-cargo-hybrid bootcut, long and lanky; in denim, she showed them with a deep cuff. A military topcoat and cropped pants were cut in a Prince of Wales crepe with a substantial hand, very Chloé in its ’70s lines. The standout piece of tailoring was a navy coat with extra-large lapels and a swallowtail hem. Its back was ribbed knit, which gave it its snug fit without (presumably) making it constricting. That goes back to Lagerfeld’s comments about unstructured weightlessness.On the accessories front, the talismanic jewelry weighed down more of the looks than necessary—a little would’ve gone a longer way—and the metal-hardware logos on the bags could be considerably more discreet. But otherwise, Ramsay-Levi has found a nice groove to work here.
28 February 2019
In addition to being a designer, Natacha Ramsay-Levi is, unsurprisingly, a serious consumer of fashion herself. She gets where her base is coming from. “I think what’s interesting about femininity is that it’s not just one directional. You can say everything and its opposite, maybe sneak in a hidden message,” she said during a recent visit to the Chloé showroom.For her Pre-Fall collection, Ramsay-Levi delivered several variations of soft-meets-strong in a cast of characters that riffed freely on the ’70s and ’80s. Reiterations of the Chloé signature bow blouse mingled with directional pieces such as a crushed-velvet apron dress, intricate knits, a lace skirt, and essential Chloé archetypes—the trench, the cape, the duffle, the cable sweater, and so on.Chloé’s horsewoman may be heading for Carnaby Street, but compellingly, many looks broke free of the usual comfort-zone, earthy tones: Those flares, for example, were back in amethyst and emerald, perhaps paired with an Edwardian shirt and a tank sweater embroidered with Chloé’s rearing steed. They also come recast in a fluid, Persian-inspired teal print that nodded to the wanderlust in Chloé’s Spring show, now paired with a carnelian cameo-print scarf blouse and a fitted, ’70s-style jacquard jacket with an archival C monogram.Tunic dresses dallied with cropped shearling; a button-down Lurex jacquard slipped under the shell of a boxy denim jacket. And with just a few exceptions (the transparent and patchwork numbers come to mind), Ramsay-Levi kept it grounded—intellectually and sartorially—with chunky boots, most winningly in “wave”-heeled embossed croc, although the square-toe loafer style in python print will have its partisans, too.Among other accessories, Chloé unveiled two new handbags: the roomy Aby day bag and the boxy Annie chain-link bag, which join new styles of the Chloé C-clasp bag and camouflage variations of the Tess bag. Elsewhere, the Aluminium jewelry collection expanded on an idea that started with a ring Ramsay-Levi’s 5-year-old son made for her out of aluminum foil.The designer says she likes the idea that when you dress, you layer on information. “What goes for summer, goes for fall—the statement is there, but the message doesn’t change. It’s timeless,” she says. Come fall, Chloé fans will probably hear that loud and clear.
11 December 2018
Getting away and escaping the confines of everyday reality is one of the season’s key themes. It’s not hard to reason why—just check the news alerts on your phone. Natacha Ramsay-Levi’s instincts at Chloé led her to Ibiza and Morocco and what she described variously as hippie modernism and New Age boho. This is sacred ground for the Chloé girl who lives for a festival frock, and Spring 2019 is Ramsay-Levi’s Chloé-est runway collection yet.To set the tone, she opened with a one-sleeved long dress belted with a sarong-like half skirt. From there, she dove headlong into scarf prints: on head-to-toe separates, on a minidress. Texture was also a big part of it. The dense chenille-like knit she used for a clingy jumpsuit evoked ceramics patterns; the silk-viscose blend woven into tight plissés on a coat boasted a Persian rug motif. Ramsay-Levi clearly expended great effort on her textiles. That denim pantsuit you saw wasn’t denim at all but a fabric that the studio painted to achieve an ombré effect.If the bags looked like they were going to work and the clothes said vacation, that seemed to be intentional. Ramsay-Levi is interested in bringing a holiday spirit into our day-to-day lives. She did that most obviously with the jewelry; layered together, the sculptural earrings, pendant necklaces, and cuffs took on almost talismanic qualities. There were also anklets and toe rings, and for nearly every look, a long scarf tightly woven into a rope belt whose ends dangled to the knees. The jewelry’s charms aside, the clothes with the most persuasive power exuded an elegant, unfettered purity: the plissé goddess gown worn by Grace Hartzel; the diagonally striped kurta, top, and pants inset with lace that made up a full wardrobe in one look; the white crocheted-to-the-ankle T-shirt dress that topped a violet bikini. Ramsay-Levi came out for her bow in scarf-print pants from the collection, a tailored blazer, and a plain white tee: modern and streamlined. This collection hit Chloé’s sweet spot, but it would be pleasing to see just a touch more of her in next season’s outing. She should trust that innate sense of cool she has.
27 September 2018
Natacha Ramsay-Levi is riding high. Her steed-emblazoned looks have proved a hit at retail, and her chunky jewelry—a mash-up of equestriana, goddesses, and ’70s-inspired statements—is moving briskly. All that, and her second collection for Chloé (for Pre-Fall) is only now just heading into stores. The designer’s fourth outing, for Resort 2019, shows her feeling cool and confident. She knows exactly where she’s going and what bears repeating.First and foremost is that rearing steed. Remixes here include a pixelated version on a jersey dress, a denim weave on the universally flattering flares she introduced for Spring, and bronze sequins over the shoulders of a T-shirt. Ramsay-Levi even corralled it into lace. On one of those propositions, it runs along the hem of a satin zebra pencil skirt. It looked fairly fearless, but the more subtle renderings, on a white lace dress, for example, were the real winners.Horsiness aside, Ramsay-Levi mines various other elements of the bourgeois vocabulary with a deft hand. “I find the idea really interesting, because while the bourgeoisie is keen to hold onto its status, it’s a social class that’s on top of what’s happening culturally, likes to mix things up, and has always supported the avant-garde,” she said.Several of those ideas will likely entice new customers. The high-neck ruffled blouse, now with a poplin front and sheerer, longer viscose back, comes to mind. So does a simple ivory dress done in stripes of lace and crepe. Or a few new riffs on lavalier tops (in jersey or on T-shirts), sailor stripes (in navy and saffron), and pleated skirts (cribbed from dresses shown on the Fall runway). Ramsay-Levi likes to reconcile sober lines with comfort and a lashing of playfulness. Perforated suede dallies with lace. Tennis stripes take it easy on a tailored jacket. One standout, a navy hybrid coat (that was a cropped Perfecto in stretch gabardine on top and techno-utilitarian to the knee), will likely get the romantically disinclined to look at Chloé in a fresh light.So, too, will the accessories. High, chain-trimmed sandals and sock-boot stilettos have the party circuit covered, but the flat sandal iterations of the Sonnie city sneakers will probably gain hipster traction, too. Under Ramsay-Levi’s watch, the house has gotten rid of exotic skins.
The new namesake Chloé cross-body shoulder bag will come in the same faux croc as the season’s boots and cut-out sandals; the tricolor mules, like a new variation on the Tess bag, are made of faux python. In jewelry, there are serpent cuffs with horse heads and fringe; drop earrings with hammered metal beads, feathers, or baroque pearls; and a cross-body harness. Ramsay-Levi referred to that last piece as “modern armor.” Sometimes, she leavens it with the motifs she calls “femininities.” As archetypes go, that makes the point as clearly as any logo (and there are many) ever will.
31 May 2018
The fashion industry fell hard for Natacha Ramsay-Levi’s debut. In one fell swoop, she definitively moved Chloé away from the festival-chick-on-holiday vibes of her predecessor. Ramsay-Levi’s are not clothes for Glastonbury. They’re for wearing to the Frieze Art Fair or a fashion happening, places where people make studies of outfits (the ones doing the wearing and the ones doing the watching) and, in that studying, are charmed.At a preview of her second collection earlier this week, Ramsay-Levi name-checked actresses of a ’70s vintage like Anjelica Huston, Sissy Spacek, Isabelle Huppert, and Stéphane Audran—she’s well-versed in cinema—and spoke of the magnetism of their auras. She set out to conjure something similar. “I want her to be very strong, but you can’t really reach her,” Ramsay-Levi said. Her process was to take quite straightforward bourgeois pieces—like a shirtdress, say—and de-normalize them. She did it by removing shirt buttons and creating a skin-baring, open-V neckline accentuated by a long pendant necklace; by dropping the waist; by adding knife pleats or embroideries; and, sometimes, by placing substantial cut-outs at the hip. There was a lot of skin-baring in the collection, a feature that is more easily pulled off on the runway than in real life. Balancing her experimental, editorial inclinations were savvy details; the Chloé logo socks looked like money in the bank, as did the chunky jewelry.Second collections are harder than the first, especially when a designer has set the bar so high for herself. Ramsay-Levi didn’t hold back here. Rather, this collection seemed more ambitious than her first: longer by 10 exits and more “worked”—with those cut-outs, with long goat-hair trim, with multi-layered looks. Chloé has been many things over the course of its many designers, but it has always been woman-friendly in the sense that the clothes had a certain French ease. Ramsay-Levi’s best looks here—an elongated blazer worn with soft jodhpur joggers, a full-sleeved chunky ribbed knit paired with a lace-inset pleated skirt, an unstructured trench, a terrific fur embroidered with the little horses from season one—achieved that. Her flares will be hot commodities if the tricky hip-crease zips are removed. With considered tweaks, these clothes could be not only cinematic but pragmatic. It’s in that mix where sales are made.
1 March 2018
Pre-Fall may be the hyphen between her freshman and sophomore runway outings, but for Chloé designer Natacha Ramsay-Levi, it’s more like home base. She has spent most of her career steering pre-collections, starting back in her Balenciaga years.“Pre-collections are where you reallydressa lot,” she offered. “With a show, you’re thinking about a look, the crafting, and an element of astonishment. With a pre-collection, you’re thinking a lot about the direction of things and questioning everything piece by piece. There’s something almost timeless about it because the pieces have to work into a wardrobe without screaming what season they’re from.”The designer concedes that working in fashion means changing your mind a lot. But with this collection she delivers a savvy exercise in repeating yourself just enough to be reassuring. Key elements from the Spring runway are carried over, remixed, and layered with activewear or utilitarian accents and a smattering of hints as to where Chloé is headed next (inevitably, the designer declined to elaborate a little more on that point).No matter—there was plenty to think about here as it is. The springboard was shirting, from a long, breezy button-down shirtdress to 1970s-print blouses, new iterations on the high-neck ruffled blouse, and a handful of riffs on the polo, notably one in scales of deep green sequins with a leather stripe in back and lace edging.The horse motif returned, cantering across pale peach blouses and onto a new bucket bag. TheOand stylizedCsignatures cropped up anew, variously on hardware or as topstitching on the pocket of a teal denim shirt, in prints, or on buttons. Spring’s prints got welcome encores as patches or as talismans in the house’s burgeoning jewelry line.The cropped pants were back, too, worn with plum or deep blue lace-up boots (leg warmers optional) or—in one of the designer’s favorite looks—paired with a checkered coat and the new leather, nylon, and canvas high-top sneaker. For those not quite ready for that length, there were high-waisted, fitted flares or cargo-inspired pants paired smartly with white blouses and fitted jackets. Winning coats included a mocha peacoat, a cotton-and-nylon trench, and a wool cape with contrasting stripes and just a hint of horsiness.Ask Ramsay-Levi to define her own style, and she’ll claim to have no idea. “I admire people who have a uniform, but I’ve never found mine and I probably never will because I love fashion’s diversity,” she explained.
For Chloé fans, Pre-Fall’s uniforms just got sorted.
10 January 2018
Natacha Ramsay-Levi is the first Frenchwoman installed at Chloé since Martine Sitbon was appointed in 1988. After Gaby Aghion founded the house in 1952, there has been a long line of successors—among them Karl Lagerfeld, Stella McCartney, Phoebe Philo, and Clare Waight Keller, who just left for Givenchy after six years. The house has proven to be a superb launching pad for the designers who’ve walked through its doors. Ramsay-Levi is well-known within French fashion circles; she worked at Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton for Nicolas Ghesquière, who was in her cheering section today, but this is her first creative director post, her first moment in the spotlight.She did a bang-up job. Despite the long, drizzly queue to get in and the tricky sight lines once we were seated—the headquarters was much too small for a crowd so curious about Ramsay-Levi—this was a super-confident debut, bubbling over with variety and distinctive pieces that will be instantly identifiable as Chloé when they start parading around next year. Not to mention with relatable accessories like cannage leather boots, python booties, and multi-strap anti-It bags to sweeten the mix.Ramsay-Levi’s approach was to look at the entire history of the house and lift a little bit from all of her predecessors. From Lagerfeld came the idea for the painted dresses, only hers are crisp cotton, not silk, and painted with auspicious symbols like eyes and hands. McCartney and Philo both liked horses, and Ramsay-Levi’schevauxwere embroidered on trim velvet tailoring. She said she took a sense of lightness from Waight Keller, indicating the floaty micro-floral print dresses. Even Hannah MacGibbon got a nod via a pair of slouchy camel pants.More than anything, though, this looked like Ramsay-Levi herself and the strong, sturdily heeled figure she’s long cut on Paris’s fashion scene. In particular, the tailored leather outerwear and skinny cropped jeans stitched with identifyingOs are a firm about-face from the dreamy bohemianism of recent Chloé collections. But it’s a shift that feels sharply attuned to our times. Elsewhere, there were trophy items aplenty that young women will eagerly save up for: silk jersey “going out” tops with embroidered bibs, a prairie dress in the faintest blue linen with rings piercing the bodice, and those horsey velvets.
28 September 2017
Chloé is in between designers.Natacha Ramsay-Leviwas installed not long after her predecessorClare Waight Keller’s last show, but her debut is scheduled for September. Thebrandmust go on—judging by the bustling showroom set up at Milk Studios today, the changing of the guard has not quashed retail interest in Chloé—so the task of designing the Resort collection fell to the design studio.This lineup touched on many familiar Chloé-isms and included a surprise or two. First, the familiar. Nothing says Chloé like a bohemian dress. Among those on offer here, the block-printed version was the standout. Ponchos came crocheted and loomed, and the navy-and-white blanket coat looked great. Tailoring came to the fore during Waight Keller’s tenure, and it had a loosely naval look here, thanks to the buttons marching up cropped jackets.As for the surprises, it’s rare to see a logo on the runway at this label’s Paris show, but considering they’ve become all but de rigueur in the last year, the Chloé logo was splayed across the shoulders of a blouson turtleneck paired athleisure-style with knit sweatpants. The placement of the upside-down “h” saved it from banality. All in all, this will keep Chloé humming along just fine until the Ramsay-Levi era begins.
7 June 2017
How do you say goodbye to a brand that you’ve helmed for six years? If you’re Chloé’s Clare Waight Keller, whose departure was announced at the end of January and rumored since late 2016, you do so via Instagram over a period of weeks, and then in a matter of minutes with a sweet Fall collection that was not, however, without a brief sting. The Human League sang “Don’t You Want Me” as the models made their finale lap and Waight Keller came out to a standing ovation for her hands-in-the-air last bow. It was hard not to read a message into that.Waight Keller’s charmed tenure at this house came in tandem with the rise of Instagram and, thanks to nostalgic references to music and film icons of the 1960s and 1970s that were both clear and strategic—Jane Birkin and Marianne Faithfull (who was in the front row today)—she oversaw the corresponding rise of the Chloé-girl mystique. For the social media holdouts out there, the Chloé girl is a festival-loving, sun-chasing bohemian (with a big bank account, it must be said) who wears track pants and Baja shirts or motorcycle leathers when she’s not in the floaty frocks that are the label’s stock-in-trade. Like Phoebe Philo and Stella McCartney, other British women who held the creative director post at this French company for shorter stints in the late ’90s and early aughts, Waight Keller liked to round out her offerings with smart tailoring.A greatest hits collection was not her inclination this season. Rather, as she pointed out backstage, her aim was to look forward with her tailoring, emphasizing a strong shoulder and dropping the waist on full-leg pleated trousers, a style she hadn’t tried before at Chloé. This puts her in league with other designers who are rejiggering and elongating the silhouette for Fall via hip-slung pants. Likewise, her boxy men’s jackets in vaguely grungy plaids keyed into the season’s major trends. Otherwise, Waight Keller was in Marianne Faithfull–dolly bird mode, cutting dresses ’60s-short and decorating them with just-this-side-of-psychedelicAlice in Wonderlandillustrations, then accessorizing them with brogue Mary Janes. The message this writer got from those frocks? Waight Keller is ready for her next adventure.
2 March 2017
There was a moment during the Chloé Pre-Fall presentation when it felt like an errant and possibly entirely unstoppable tear might just slowly roll down my cheek. Okay, before you get the wrong idea, it was entirely due to one of creative director Clare Waight Keller’s coats. It was in autumnal rust wool, cut long and lean and waisted with a belt, the line extended by a high roll collar, and amplified by the chunky knit sleeves. It wasn’t so wildly different, save for those sleeves, from a coat my own mom had spent hours deliberating over buying in a boutique in Edinburgh way back in the last gasp of the 1970s; Waight Keller’s coat, just one of many outerwear options she showed, from an oversize denim jacket with a vaguely kimono shape to a cotton canvas and reverse shearling cagoule, was an immediate blast from the past, one fuzzy with a warm feeling of nostalgia. (You see: If you can also remember a nanosecond of your life like that in such intense detail and recall it with such emotion, chances are you’ll end up working in fashion, too.)You could say that warm and nostalgic was the leitmotif of Waight Keller’s Pre-Fall, which was built on the notion of bundling you up in layers of deeply tactile textures, the fabrics worked into the type of oversize and non-sexualized volumes that spoke to the era of the newly liberated ’70s. There were blazers with wide curved lapels and patch pockets, fluid jersey dresses with button and loop fastenings, and romantic tiered lace blouses. Some looks were worn with low-heeled mid-calf boots in claret or black adorned with buttons and with an aged texture to the leather, which had a kind of charming, seen it all, done it all, borne out of the experience-of-life quality to them. Exactly the kind of quality that you might expect if you’d been wearing the boots to countless protest marches or . . . Broadway auditions. Waight Keller’s mood board, propped up in her studio, was an homage to the likes of Diane Keaton and Meryl Streep, and there was a distinctlyAnnie Hall/Kramer vs. Kramervibe to her collection. In fact, Streep, during her Golden Globes lifetime achievement award acceptance speech, demonstrated she is still feisty and forthright, and that night, there really wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
24 January 2017
After last season’s virtual motorcycle trip, Chloé’sClare Waight Kellerwas in the mood for a more urban vibe. “I wanted to bring it back to the city. It was time to clean it up,” she said backstage, wearing an oversize white tee tucked into high-waisted pants. A version of that look would come down the runway a few moments later. Waight Keller works on instinct, subtly attuned to the vagaries of her own desires and wardrobe needs. WithBouchra JarrarandMaria Grazia Chiurirecently installed atLanvinandDior, respectively, the ranks of women designers at top brands in Paris are growing—and hurrah to that!—but Chloé has been benefiting from having a fashion-loving female in charge for some time.Halfway through the show is where her headline came: A pair of boyish pantsuits strolled out—one black and one off-white, the jackets lapel-less and trousers slung from the hips. Tailoring as office-ready and straightforward and frill-free as this is a fairly rare sight chez Chloé, but not an unwelcome one. Waight Keller is feeling it, which means it’s a good bet her girl will be soon. Those suits were her baseline, and from there she elaborated on the urban idea with a reined-in color palette of crisp white and navy, and with tops and bottoms as unflouncy as anything we’ve seen from this label in a long time. The designer’s new pants were modeled on sailor’s uniforms, flanked by buttons at the waist and super-full all the way through the calves, where they were cinched above the ankles. They looked cool.That sharp sense of resolve didn’t last all the way through, but that’s okay. Chloé does a big business in hippie dresses, and in this case Waight Keller was content to give her customers what they already want. Or at least updated versions of it. Her pleated, tiered, and lace-trimmed frocks in sorbet shades were short this season, rather than floor grazing. Also in the mix: ditzy floral prints on a camisole and an off-the-shoulder top worn with matching pants. They were a sweet compromise between the familiar Chloé and the new.
29 September 2016
It’s T minus less than 48 hours untilChloé’sSpring 2017 show in Paris. Clare Waight Keller and co. are expecting a nice turnout, as usual, and the assorted actresses, pop stars, and famous offspring will be wearing the label’s Pre-Spring offering, which arrives in stores in about three weeks. Consider the front row pics that will stream across the Internet and Instagram on Thursday a sort of see-now-buy-now collection.Describing it, Waight Keller said she was thinking about Los Angeles and points further south. The great-looking graphic striped denim could’ve walked straight out of Topanga Canyon circa the 1970s, while the big ponchos and gaucho pants “came from South America,” she explained. The serape-style striped ponchos were among the collection’s most distinctive pieces; their urbanized sisters were shown in solid camel or black with thick lacing at the neck. Waight Keller paired the camel one with a new pant silhouette that she based on a cool vintage military pair she came across, baggy through the thigh and tapered at the ankle. One of the main attractions at Chloé is Waight Keller’s hippie-chic dresses, and no wonder. With their trapeze shapes, they supply drama and ease in equal measure. The Pre-Spring versions have not quite as much flair as the ones we’re likely to see on the runway Thursday morning, but it’s nevertheless a good bet that a few of them will be worn by the It girls in the front row.
27 September 2016
Pre-Fall collections tend not to have a soundtrack, a set, or the reactions of the crowd, among other elements of persuasion. ButChloé’s latest—shown back in January at the company’s Paris headquarters—managed to be pretty evocative anyway. The ability to conjure not just a mood but an entire lifestyle is designerClare Waight Keller’s gift.This season it appears that the Chloé woman will be traipsing from a weekend idyll in Morocco (a tapestry coat of many colors) to a music festival (patchwork silver sequined track pants and billowy silk blouse) to the wilds of upstate New York via Brooklyn (denim tunic worn with zip-legged denim pants stuffed into crepe-soled shearling boots). There was shearling outerwear of many types, but Waight Keller didn’t skimp on lighter stuff like wispy point d’esprit dresses and sheer lace frocks, a smart move considering the clothes are arriving in stores just as summer temperatures start to take hold. From the looks of things, the Chloé woman’s lifestyle doesn’t entail much time spent in an office, but when it’s necessary, she's lucky enough to get away with long trousers in a decidedly noncorporate shade of apricot or smocked-waist, super-wide-leg pants in gray marl sweatshirt fabric. Nearly everything here had a slouched-on, slightly-to-significantly oversize silhouette, which added to the overall carefree spirit.
27 April 2016
Chloéhas a backstory this season that can’t be beat.Clare Waight Kellerdiscovered Anne-France Dautheville, a fabulous-looking Frenchwoman who traveled across Europe and through the Middle East on a motorbike in the 1970s. In a book about her journey, Dautheville wrote, “I went around the world, because, in the end, it was just a little further. Because time ceased to exist, and the fleeting moments of chance encounters along the way were the only thing that mattered.” It could be a manifesto for our plugged-in age. Waight Keller has turned Chloé into a top brand through her keen appreciation of the wanderlust in so many of us. We want to channel the festival girl and the free-spirited biker chick precisely because the reality is we spend our days hunched over our phones, developing text neck and complaining about our fading eyesight. We’d like to feel the wind whipping through our hair.There was a direct link between vintage photos of Dautheville and Waight Keller’s new collection. Look 4 was a very literal interpretation of a motocross jacket and pants. It was a one-off. More often, Waight Keller combined the Chloé froth—the ruffled silk and lace tops and dresses that are the brand’s stock-in-trade—with more hard-driving pieces, or über-luxe versions of them at least. A romantic white silk blouse was remixed with black leather pants roomy enough to ride in, and the hippiest of her hippie dresses was topped by an everywoman fleece actually cut from shearling. The show’s high-low vibes are a timely evolution of the typically high-high Chloé aesthetic, one in keeping with the streetwise sensibility trickling up from labels like Vetements, that still feels true to the brand.A pair of black leather salopettes worn over one of those souped-up fleeces is destined to be the collection’s most popular look, precisely because it’s something we could believably wear while pecking away at our devices. But there was no shortage of dresses to make us dream: a white caftan densely embroidered with pearl buttons and other colorful bits and bobs, and Frederikke Sofie’s tufted trapeze dress, so light it seemed to float around her.Dautheville is in her 70s now. If Waight Keller and co. know what they’re doing, they’ll publish an English edition of her book and take it on the road. We can see a Chloé biker-girl gang causing a real stir at Coachella or Glastonbury. If it happens, we’d sign up to tag along.
3 March 2016
The 1990s is one of Spring’s big stories, but no one has put forward her interest in the decade more explicitly thanClare Waight Kellerat Chloé. On every seat, there was a printed note: “This season’s collection is a tribute to girls named Kate, Chloé, Cecilia, Corinne, Rosemary, Emma, and Courtney, who embody the liberty and the elegance of a perfectly mastered and excessively lived simplicity.” Backstage, the designer explained she grew up alongside that motley crew of models, photographers, and superstar performers. For Waight Keller, they represent a freer time: “There’s such a fast pace to fashion now; I think we’ve lost the innocence of the spirit of fashion, the youthful optimism that it portrays. And I think there’s something quite joyful about fashion that’s been missing.”In keeping with that sentiment, she imbued the new collection with a playful spirit, quite literally in the case of the rave-girl tracksuit separates she started with. Athleisure is something different for Chloé, and it was most convincing when Waight Keller combined a split-hem track pant with a romantic, off-the-shoulder shirt typical of the brand. As the show progressed, it took on more of those familiar Chloé tropes—festival dresses, peasant tops, lacy little bandeaux and miniskirts—but never lost its ’90s leanings. The denim separates were oversize and frayed. Overalls—in trouser and dress form—conjured images of raves gone by, too. There were even Hammer (as in MC) pants. All of which will likely play exceedingly well with young women who missed out on them the first time around.Waight Keller had Georgina Grenville, Cecilia Chancellor, and Angela Lindvall representing the ’90s in the front row, but what a kick it would’ve been to see them on the runway in these clothes. Youthful optimism is wasted on the young.
1 October 2015
Fleetwood Mac soundtracked the Chloé show in Paris this past February. For Resort, Clare Waight Keller had Brian Eno on the brain. Eno in his Roxy Music incarnation, that is—there wasn't music playing in the Chloé showroom today, but you could guess the vintage from the louche vibe of the clothes on display. According to Waight Keller, what inspired her about Eno was the way he would summon different attitudes when he performed, and with that in mind, she divvied up this collection into three sections: one, a group in gothic black, which featured lots of lacy maxi dresses and skirts; a second feral group that emphasized animal prints and jacquards; and a third group that riffed on glam-rock romance, going heavy-duty on billowy-ness and ruffles. So far, so very Chloé—and not so very different, in fact, from much of the stuff on the runway for Fall '15. There were some distinguishing elements, however. Waight Keller's pencil skirts with lengthy slits slashed in front and back were sharply cut and dead sexy, and her way of mixing frothy looks with thick, oversize knits or sporty items such as baseball jackets or slouchy tapered pants made for a nice update. The real news, though, was the mega-wide-leg trousers, a must-have in soft washed denim or chambray, and a silhouette that the designer ought to elaborate on next season. In a collection that raised the volume on the signature Chloé diaphanousness, those pants, in particular, provided a sense of backbone. Or, as Eno may have put it, a backbeat.
3 June 2015
A new mood began at Chloé last season, with the most confident collection that creative director Clare Waight Keller had produced to date. The Chloé girl lost much of her pouty, superfluous French folderol: Despite her penchant for voluminous cheesecloth, she became precise, measured, and a much tougher creature—not the type to burst into tears if her boyfriend was caught flirting, say, with a Givenchy girl or even a Céline woman. Instead, this Chloé girl can now stand her ground among those other creations, and for Fall, both her and Waight Keller's confidence increased.Yes, admittedly she is a bit folksy, she does worship at the altar of Laurel Canyon, and she does have lovely hair—center parted, natch. But as the first model emerged today, to the sound of Fleetwood Mac—the predominant music of the show, theRumoursperiod—you couldn't argue with her. Just as you cannot argue with Fleetwood Mac—as clichéd as some may think such a soundtrack is, there is simply something wrong with someone who does not like Fleetwood Mac. And Chloé is attempting this grand, widespread appeal too.The first look was a floor-sweeping, tailored greatcoat in military melton wool, with a narrow, peaked shoulder—structured just so—tailored wool trousers; and a more feminine blouse. This rigorous masculine precision persisted in the tailoring throughout the collection. It balanced out all the flou and made the Chloé girl much more desirable and, dare it be said, actually sexual—something that is sometimes missing under all the layers of muslin and flirtatious girlishness at the label.The feel was far more straightforward than before, without sacrificing femininity; Waight Keller just decided not to pander to many of the fantasy clichés of it. "To be modern, it has to be real," said the designer after her show. "I really wanted to capture something confident, but still with a carefree spirit. I can only describe the Chloé girl as a 'gentlewoman,' wearing guardsmen's coats and gentlemen's clothing, but still with the flou and lingerie lace. There is something clean and narrow about her silhouette, but still with a fluidity to it."The Chloé girl is becoming much more the subject who does and takes charge, rather than the object who looks pretty and floaty. And as March 8 is International Women's Day, it seems a welcome time for that empowerment.
8 March 2015
It's tempting to imagine that Clare Waight Keller came to her inspiration for this season's Chloé collection by accident: Playing music alphabetically off iTunes, David Bowie'sBest of Bowieserendipitously gave way to Kate Bush'sThe Sensual World,and lo and behold, a collection was conceived. That probably isn't what happened, but however it did, Waight Keller was onto something, drawing a line between Bush's rural, gypsy romanticism and Bowie's urbane, androgynous glam. You could imagine either artist, at a certain point in his or her career, donning one of the designer's silk poet-sleeve blouses or throwing on a cape-like coat in a madcap combination of shearling and Mongolian fur. There was a nigh-on louche opulence here, witnessed in everything from the touch of Lurex on a pair of fantastic, low-slung boot-cut pants to the Aubrey Beardsley-esque prints and the nub of longhair pony on a bag or miniskirt. Nowhere was that opulence better exemplified than in a diaphanous gown of Lurex-dabbed printed silk: Slit vertiginously, the dress was largely comprised of ribbons of the silk that had been sewn onto a sheer backing, and it conjured nothing so much as butterfly wings. Verysexybutterfly wings, it must be noted—and that sensuality operated throughout the collection as a whole. Chloé is usually associated with a kind of virginal, gamine look, but Waight Keller chucked it this time—some of these clothes were intensely womanly, others rather boyish, and a good deal of them were borderline feral. Lolita was missing this season. But she wasn't missed.
8 December 2014
You know the type, the kind of French girl who wears cheesecloth and gladiator sandals and has lovely hair and is all "he-he-he" with her musical laugh, and "tra-la-la" with her talk. And did I mention she has lovely hair? There is a reason that film is calledSlap Her, She's French. And yet, despite the Chloé girl today having so many of those elements in abundance—I have absolutely no idea about the laughter and the accent, mind you, but the hair today was indeed lovely—in this collection, somehow, you did not want to slap her. You might have even wanted tobeher.What could have turned out to be hippie-dippie-boho nonsense in other hands was a resounding success for Clare Waight Keller, the creative director of Chloé. There was something no-nonsense about the Spring collection: pretty yet precise, elegant but not excessive, practical rather than pouty. There were simply great silhouettes that spoke for themselves and concentrated on their proportions—styling was stripped-back, clean, chic, and worked to emphasize the quality of the collection, as did the spot-on casting of the models.As Waight Keller herself put it: "The starting point was fabrics that tell stories, particularly 'folkloric' textiles like the encrusted birds in cheesecloth, but I wanted honest, direct shapes. I liked the idea of denim, that it can be used raw or washed and it becomes personal to the wearer—it is immediate and honest. I wanted to have an idea of workwear as well as the flou, which was about volume and expanded from that densely packed fabric, crepon georgette. I wanted that one amazing shape that just hung off thin spaghetti straps."The designer has always looked slightly more at home with the Fall collection, but that tougher and rougher attitude supplanted last Spring's style and worked very well. So tailoring was made in lace or was ring-pierced, there were denim-washed knits like the standout voluminous hoodie and precise powdered suedes, while a workwear element ran through much of the collection, balancing out anything too "wafty" or what might once have appeared cloyingly winsome. Even the sandals were not the usual fare, but slightly wedged and beautifully done.Yesterday Gaby Aghion, who founded Chloé in 1952, passed away. This collection was dedicated to her. You can't help but think she would have been pleased with it.
28 September 2014
Of all the big French fashion houses, Chloé is perhaps the most humane. The core of the brand's identity, after all, is ease and joie de vivre. So there was a nice fit in Clare Waight Keller's take on Le Corbusier in this collection. A visit to the Villa Savoye in Poissy prompted Waight Keller to contemplate not only its aesthetics, but also the dynamic relationship between those aesthetics and the actual living done inside and outside of the house. With that in mind, she blended Le Corbusier's graphic exteriors with fluid shapes and sensual tactility. The long, flowing wrap skirts will find a lot of fans; ditto the slouchy tweed tops and duster-length coat with exaggerated lapels. Waight Keller was playing with proportion here, proposing lean, attenuated tops worn over loose skirts that drifted just above the ankle; she opened up the volume again at the sleeve. One particular dress, in blue silk, softened the look and made the proportion very convincing, as did the wrapped black-and-white top worn over a higher-hemmed skirt. The experiments with fringe, meanwhile, were less consistently successful. A white evening blouse with graphic bands of black eyelash fringe was chic; so too a long black sweater with hooped fringe about the collar. But the gypsy-fringed guipure dresses came off all frosting, no cake, and the floral jacquard embroidery, trimmed with eyelash fringe, that spread over a black gown was just kind of weird-looking, frankly. The weirdness seemed contrary to the collection's essential humaneness, which was demonstrated in the best pieces here, with their feeling of movement and sense of hand.
8 June 2014
With each passing season under the stewardship of Clare Waight Keller, the creative director of Chloé, there is often a swing between soft and hard, the girlish and the boyish. But this Fall there was perhaps an injection of a new element: something wild. The coherence and boyish discipline, together with the pretty-prettiness of Chloé, was given an additional jolt with the wild and woolly today.Fabrics and textures are always very well done at Chloé, but this season they were particularly effective, with added warmth—both literally and metaphorically. There was a notion of letting loose in those printed wild-cat furs with additional rainbow tufting, an element that was echoed by a rainbow leopard-spot jacquard. Waight Keller also showed tangled fringing; delicate, shaggy, cut silk jacquards; and mid-heeled sheepskin ankle-strap shoes that were particularly compelling. In short, the Chloé muse seems to have gone a bit off her head for Fall—and she was better for it, needing to ease up a bit after last season's lesson in contempo French girl style.All of this was managed with an insouciant attitude—the Chloé girl still had polish. "She's wilder and more mysterious," said Waight Keller. "She has an urban mystery." She also has a rather nice array of pillowy, padded leathers to protect herself from the elements in this urban jungle, to cloak all of the pretty silk chiffon and georgette pieces. As well as those great leather shorts that have become such a Chloé staple. The Fall collection was all rather playful, pretty, and perverse—it might have had the element of the wild cat, but she purrs rather than roars for Chloé.
1 March 2014
The most eye-catching looks at last season's Chloé show were undoubtedly Clare Waight Keller's goddess-y pleated pieces. Those pleats came off so strong, indeed, that some of her other good ideas flew relatively under the radar. But not to worry: The designer repeated herself here, reviving Spring's sexy, side-slit skirts with little tap shorts underneath, not to mention that collection's Mannerist blouses and its graphic lace and curving seams. Much to her credit, Waight Keller made all this look pretty fresh—and anyway, whyshouldgood ideas go in the bin after one outing? This time, she introduced a different kind of girlish inflection, with lots of waterfall ruffles, and worked that Chloé signature flirtiness against outerwear cocoonish and graphic. Piped wraps and short jackets in double-face wool had a ton of appeal; the knockout, however, had to be the reversible shearling blanket coat, patchworked in varying textures of shearling on one side and blocked in panels of printed shearling on the other. Just the thing for the polar vortex, you'd have to say.
5 January 2014
Chloé has become the go-to place for a certain girls wardrobe, for something polished with punch. An English, boyish discipline added to the French finesse of the house has been in the ascendant. But today the concentration moved more toward the French side, and the more overtly feminine feel of a certain kind of French style. The music might have been loud drum and bass, with all of its hard, mid-nineties London connotations, but this collection felt decidedly rooted in Paris.A girl more sensual than before is how Clare Waight Keller, the creative director of Chloé, defined the muse of her new collection. Softening the boyish toughness she has introduced at the house while not completely eliminating it had been the goal, and she largely succeeded.Waight Keller seemed primarily concerned with making her point through fabric choices: A sense of sensuality through transparency, she said before her show. And there were indeed great fabrics in the collection: super-matte georgette; a patchwork jacquard; light quilting; a rough, more geometric lace. They all added to a certain sense of tough sensuality for the season, as did the more angular silhouettes.Yes, tight accordion pleats were in evidence in this collection, too. This is the season of the Pleats, Please revival—after it had been Pleats, No Thanks for years. But the Chloé pleated garments were some of the best around. Among the strongest pieces were the tapered-leg khaki trousers with ankle ties, the khaki dress defined by Waight Keller as flag shaped with a deepV,and the inset pleats featured in a blue patterned dress, giving a dynamic effect. And the most sensual garment of the collection was pleated, too—a white dress with arm ties, split high at the sides, worn with silk cami-knicker-style shorts. Clare Waight Keller has not produced anything quite that sexy before.If this collection didnt quite reach the heights of last season, it really shined in its more boyish and playful moments, such as in the final inset-chain pieces. Overall, it was another accomplished offering at the house, and Chloés consistency is no mean feat.
28 September 2013
Clare Waight Keller wears the pants. That's not a feminist bromide; it's a sartorial fact. Even at the Met Gala last year, she opted for trousers. They've always been part of her vision for Chloé, but they've rarely seemed as front and center as they did today. And now's the time. Waight Keller has been at the label for a few revolutions of the fashion cycle: More than ever, the shots are hers to call. "It's the new Chloé proportion," she said, definitively, after her mini presentation today. "It's really my handwriting." The fluffed-up volume, the soft layers, the larger pants and cropped tops. "It's easy for me to wear," she said. "I'm not a supermodel proportion, and it's obviously bringing a versatility to other women as well."The pants came in a few variations for this collection—a high-waisted, floppy version in Super 120s men's suiting wool; a cropped style with folded pleats—but despite the fashion quotient, they had what Waight Keller called her "barefoot attitude." The proportions are meant to be relaxed—so relaxed you can wear them with flats. To back it up, Waight Keller showed flats: neoprene slides like glorified shower shoes with a gleaming gold band, and a flat sandal whose gold ankle fastener is modeled on the cuffs that tether surfers to their boards.There were great bits throughout, like a sweatshirt inlaid with guipure lace and the layered "trenches" that separate into gilet and bolero. There were feminine dresses too, even if, on closer inspection, most had the pull-on ease of T-shirts. If you were looking to nitpick, you might say that the odd piece here or there had echoes of others' work. But on the whole, and especially in those trouser looks, the collection bore Waight Keller's own firm stamp. As if to christen that occasion properly, she introduced a floppy new bag, and called it the Clare.
9 June 2013
Clare Waight Keller, the creative director of Chloé, showing her fourth season for the house, perhaps defined herself and her particular output for the label most clearly today. In presenting a somewhat tougher girl than is expected for Chloé, she made it her best collection yet.There is a certain English and boyish discipline that Waight Keller has added to the collections at Chloé—both in their style and substance. This appears to come from the lessons learned by being an accomplished menswear designer in the past. Today she used her skills to the full in presenting the idea of a schoolgirl growing into her own identity through style."It's about girls who emerge from uniform," said the designer backstage before her show. "It's essentially about girls creating independence through the way they dress." She eschewed the cute and the surface perversity of such a theme—this was far from a replaying of Britney Spears' "Hit Me, Baby…One More Time" moment. Instead there was an elegance and hauteur in what was presented in double-faced and pressed wools, tweeds, and fille coupe fabrics. That was the influence of the French house; the English-schoolgirl attitude—Clare Waight Keller herself went to school in Birmingham—came through in the show's soundtrack. This girl likes to listen to an old-school hip-hop mixtape, no doubt whilst being moody in her bedroom, featuring a preponderance of Roxanne Shanté.The tough and the elegant came together in harnessed pinafores and capes with metal detailing; in the strategic use of leather, particularly in the gray leather jogging bottoms; and in the boyish boilersuiting. It culminated with an overtop and overdress both made by a chain-link fence manufacturer. These garments were given a luxe spin by having paste jewels embedded in them. It was a collection that was playful in a British-playground sense and precise à la Parisienne. It moved the "state of mind" of the Chloé label in a new direction and proved that girlish does not have to be girly.
2 March 2013
At today's Chloé presentation, designer Clare Waight Keller chatted a while about the progress her children have been making in French. They speak it, she remarked, but a little shyly. The same might be said of Waight Keller's approach to designing for Chloé. She brings an English sense of mix, and of matter-of-factness, to her work for the brand, which celebrated its 60th anniversary last season, and though she is a deft interpreter of that insouciant Chloé lightness, Waight Keller's still most at home with fashion references from the other side of the Channel.For this collection, Waight Keller drew on sixties mod for inspiration, and emphasized Carnaby Street shapes such as boyish cropped trousers and A-line dresses and skirts. Her French is getting more fluent, though: Alongside the uniformly strong trousers, the big winners here were looks with a distinctly French point of view, such as a flounced organza cocktail dress in a pale mint color that looked suitable for a remake ofThe Umbrellas of Cherbourg,and a whole range of pieces done in a vaguelybon chic, bon genreconfetti tweed, as well as silks and knits that riffed on it. The shift-shaped silk shirtdresses, meanwhile, were shown smartly belted and came off as a throwaway take on vintage YSL—not a bad thing, by any means. Overall, this collection affirmed Waight Keller's growing confidence at Chloé's helm, and proffered a wide mix of nicely detailed pieces that women will want to wear.
6 January 2013
It is a tall order to be the creative director of a house during its 60th anniversary. And to do that in only your third season is an even taller one. Yet Clare Waight Keller came through this challenge with suitable aplomb for Spring. It was her most accomplished collection yet.The designer appeared unbowed by the weight of history—what was shown today was not a greatest-hits collection. Yet, at the same time, she seemed to have subtly absorbed the lessons of the archive to be found in the Judith Clark-curated "Chloé: Attitudes" retrospective currently showing at the Palais de Tokyo. The main lesson being that the unifying factor in Chloé's history is not a surface style, but rather a state of mind. Gaby Aghion, the founder of the brand, had wanted to free women from the heaviness and import of haute couture. She did this with a lightness and an insouciance in her attitude to fashion and to life. "I actually started by looking at transcripts of Gaby's talks with us," Waight Keller explained of the collection after her show. "She said something that really struck me: 'I never explain anything. I live my life, and I live the life I love.'"In that way there is no real narrative for this Chloé collection, just an idea of a certain feminine confidence—and a more French one than has been seen for some time. Simultaneously there is a certain English and boyish discipline that Waight Keller has added to the clothes, both in style and structure. Concentrating on the cropped, the mid-length, and the long—"a clean organization of looks," as the designer put it—there was a play on layering, particularly in the transparent and the solid, as well as Bermuda shorts and "side pleat" trousers. Technical experiments with materials were another way this collection was freed from the weight of history; the creation of volume and structure with a stiff, geometric lace and the use of pleated Japanese polyester brought about some of the prettiest looks. Yet a few of these dresses indeed had their counterparts in the exhibition, such as a flesh pink, transparent pleated tulle dress that Karl Lagerfeld had created during his tenure at Chloé in the eighties. It's telling that Lagerfeld is the go-to designer for Waight Keller, and it further points to an interest in the substance of Chloé as much as its style.
30 September 2012
Chloé's Clare Waight Keller spoke of a "new romantic feel" for her Resort collection. Cap the N and the R and the comparison would still hold. There's been a whiff of the eighties about Waight Keller's Chloé since she took the reins, especially in the exaggerated volumes of her silhouettes, and that continues here. Crisper materials made a counterpoint to the looser shapes—there were acres of crunchy cotton poplin and cotton grosgrain, "keeping the sharpness within," as Waight Keller said—but overall, the designer emphasized ease. Many of her tops and dresses are basically a single square of fabric—an oversize handkerchief, really—cinched with embroidered waists or belted, obi-style. It's hard to imagine easier than dungarees, which is just how the designer described her all-in-one of the season, in washed silk georgette. Her "summer shearling" was toweling fabric, stitched into kimono tops or used as paneling on carrot trousers. Itlookedappealingly graphic when paneled onto those pants, but it might be the place where ease gets too easy.
10 June 2012
Fall is Clare Waight Keller's second season at Chloé. For direction she looked to her own experience as a Brit in Paris. Backstage she explained that she tried to mix the casual vibe of English sportswear with the dressier sensibility of the French. That's the concept that informed the red knit sweatpants she paired with a pop-over lace blouse, or a floral embroidered sweatshirt worn with a quilted satin pencil skirt.Sporty outerwear in the form of a peach duffel coat, or a bomber in the same powdery shade, was the collection's main strength. Knitwear, with which she has lots of experience from her years leading Pringle of Scotland, came in second. A hand-knit turtleneck in heathery pastels will have admirers. The big problem here was what that sweater was matched with: droopy leather bloomers with elasticized hems that hit slightly south of the knees. These abbreviated pants made multiple appearances, and they weren't doing the models any favors.Waight Keller has a good handle on the breezy, uncomplicated frock that is Chloé's claim to fame. She proved that last season, and she confirmed it here with a deep red drop-waist T-shirt dress and an ivory shirtdress with a lace skirt. These would be a good place to start when she sets to work on next season.
4 March 2012
Chloé's creative director, Clare Waight Keller, is only on her second collection for the house, but she's working with a steady hand. For pre-fall, she looked to the photos of Garry Winogrand, whose candid shots of Manhattanites on the avenues in the sixties are proto-street-style shots if there ever were any. But unlike the ultra-practiced subjects of today's street-style brigade, their predecessors dressed with a certain spontaneity. "A mishmash," Waight Keller called it, and she appropriated it for the line.The designer spoke of catching the moment when the sixties, with its prints and graphicism, shaded into the lounge-y, flowy seventies—classic Chloé, in other words, with fluid dresses picking up Spring's pleat motif. She drove home the hither-and-thither point with proportions that ebbed and flowed: billowing, pleated trousers with matching shrunken jackets and cropped sweaters, cocooning coats with floppy, rolled-up sleeves over skintight pants. That giant coat might be overwhelming to some, but Waight Keller insisted on its ease. "It's like a cardigan," she said. Whether you'll see it on the streets or not, you surely will find it in fashion editorial pages. Chloé's salespeople, on the other hand, will swoon for her reversible shearling teddy (shown, cleverly, and in a typical Waight Keller move, over a matching gilet for a trompe l'oeil effect). It married mishmash to polish.
8 January 2012
Clare Waight Keller has replaced Chloé's Hannah MacGibbon, whose contract wasn't renewed earlier this year. MacGibbon had more successes at the label than her predecessor, Paulo Melim Andersson, did, but she never quite managed to recapture the magic of Chloé's Phoebe Philo years. So, what are the new girl's chances?Waight Keller's credentials include a fairly long stint at Pringle of Scotland, where she did a good job of getting to the soul of the cashmere company. Her stint at Gucci under Tom Ford doing knits couldn't have hurt. The challenge at Chloé, which will celebrate its 60th anniversary next year, will be which roots to return to—the Karl Lagerfeld years? Philo's heyday? The latter isn't as strange a proposition as it sounds. Now that the nineties have been plundered, the aughties are inevitably next. Some saw shades of Phoebe in a navy silk and cream chiffon tuxedo shirt. But it was Karl's name Waight Keller checked; the hyperreal flower embroideries on crisp shirts and flowy shorts date to his era.Aside from those florals, though, it didn't feel like a radical departure from MacGibbon's recent work. "Fluidity and femininity, but boyish" were Waight Keller's buzzwords backstage; she made them reality with lots of pleats, tented A-line shapes, foundation colors, and full trousers. The highlights were the belted, below-the-knee pleated dresses with marquetry patterns. Overall, the collection was pretty, but perhaps a bit safe. Right now, Waight Keller has the fashion world's goodwill. We'll be watching next season, rooting for her to loosen things up.
2 October 2011
With Hannah MacGibbon out and Clare Waight Keller's runway debut slated for this October, Chloé's Resort collection was put together by the design team. So this was a season less about floating new ideas and more about reworking house classics. Luckily for team Chloé, the seventies (the era from which Chloé sprang and the one favored by MacGibbon) are still lingering in the air. The flaring, wide-leg pants we've been seeing on the label's Paris catwalk for the last several seasons (and on the streets everywhere) were back, in everything from black sequins to denim chambray to cotton sweatsuit fabric. And the familiar airy trapeze dresses got a refresh, too, the best coming in a vivid green silk. Outerwear was a strong point, whether it was the army green patent leather trench or the crisp navy coat with the built-in mini cape. In the end, though, this is a brand in a holding pattern waiting for its new leader.
15 June 2011
Snakeskin, and plenty of it, is Hannah MacGibbon's obsession du jour. A year ago it was camel. For Spring it was sheer. As preoccupations go, this one produced one of her livelier outings, maybe a shade too much so. The Chloé customer will recognize the seventies-ish Charlie Girl shapes, but this time MacGibbon woke up to the potential of pattern and she applied it—liberally.First up: a simple crew-neck sweater paneled with snakeskin and low-slung, pleated, full-leg pants in a snakeskin print. It was followed in short order by a python mac, a snakeskin intarsia sweater dress, a snakeskin print shirtdress, and well, you get the picture. The patchworks of python print in different colors had a graphic impact on the runway, but their chances off of it are slim compared to the round-toe, stack-heel pumps in the real thing. In the end, it's simply a material best applied in small doses. But, like we said, liberal was the order of the day: That two-tone tracksuit was all leather.A yellow silk button-down, paired with high-waisted, cropped, and flared faded blue jeans, stood out. You could see someone in that outfit strolling out into the Tuileries sunshine and driving the thronging street-style photographers wild. Beautiful color; a bold, yet uncomplicated shape. Sometimes that's all it takes to cast a fashion spell.
6 March 2011
The surprise at theChloéshowroom was the color. The canary yellow shirt and skirt, the pumpkin ribbed-knit sweater, and the burnt sienna upholstery-leather skirt—not to mention the huge, gorgeous, patchworked shawl that incorporated those three shades—qualify as big news in the universe of designer Hannah MacGibbon, who's made a virtue of all beige runway shows. She even did an oversize paisley print in brown and white and a blanket stripe coat. But things haven't changed so much chez Chloé that you won't recognize the seventies-style fit of a corduroy pantsuit or the topcoat with the precise military cut. Long tunic dresses over full trousers looked new and in line with the season.You can't exactly argue that the house has returned to its early aughts heyday, when its Paddington bags seemed to sell out overnight. But there have been recent successes on the accessories front, specifically the Marcie, a saddlebag that comes in several different sizes and colors. For pre-fall, Chloé's likely It extra is a knee-high chunky-heeled boot that will make a smart accompaniment to MacGibbon's just-below-the-knee skirts.
12 January 2011
Hannah MacGibbon still loves beige. That hasn't changed, but there was a welcome lightness in her Spring collection. If last season's Chloé girl was headed off to work in seventies-inflected sportswear, now she looks like she's on her way to dance rehearsal. A typical outfit was a nude leotard with a scooped-out back and a matching below-the-knee pleated skirt, worn with red ballet flats. Another: a bodysuit plus sheer tutulike skirt, with shorts underneath to address the sheerness factor.That last look in particular had some of the girlishness that used to be this label's defining factor. For the most part, though, MacGibbon was working a minimal look, as evidenced by the collection's coats—unadorned, save for a few shiny buttons, and cut in black, ivory, or red crepe (the collection's one shot of bright color). The tonal way a top matched a pair of track pants, say, or a slim, slightly A-line skirt also contributed to the pared-down vibe. At times, the white shirting fabric used for full-skirted dresses and blouses felt a bit too clinical. Overall, the collection could've used more of the summery heat implied by those breezy skirts.
3 October 2010
After a Fall collection for Chloé that erred perhaps too much on the side of ladylike, Hannah MacGibbon has produced a more youthful lineup this time around. The creamy makeup palette is back. The slightly seventies vibe is in effect, too. So what's changed? For starters, there's a timely spareness to the silhouette: no pleats on the trousers and no overpowering bows on shirts, either. A long-sleeve ecru canvas and leather dress whipstitched at the waist is utterly wearable. Ditto a three-piece pantsuit in the same pale shade, and a simple yet chic black all-in-one. MacGibbon has always seemed print-averse; here she chose a subtle tone-on-tone floral for an adorable blouse and high-waisted shorts set. The brick red she used for a leather T-shirt and a button-front canvas skirt was eye-catching, too. For Resort, of course, play is always the thing, but the lightness and girlishness of this collection are both positive changes.
22 June 2010
Beige, beige, and more beige. It's no news by now that the paler shade of brown, and the grown-up daywear it connotes, have become mainstays of the season. It's the route Chloé has taken for Fall, with such thorough commitment that until halfway through, it almost seemed Hannah MacGibbon was reluctant to offer anything else.From the outset, she whittled the look down to its clearest components: a long-sleeved silk blouse and high-waist flared trousers, and the bouncy, blown-out Charlie girl hair that captures the seventies American sportswear attitude this trend is all about. Next up, MacGibbon introduced knitwear, classic menswear overcoats, and an early-Armani-like jacket that might have jumped out ofVogue's pages in the post-women's lib era—when dashing to work while looking enthusiastically businesslike was the thing.It's a feeling, of course, that MacGibbon shares with her British female designer peers Phoebe Philo and Stella McCartney, who both passed through the Chloé studio some while back. They left the label with a reputation for girly dressing, jingly-jangly It bags, and statement shoes, but now that they're all into their thirties, these young professionals are leading a different life.MacGibbon's house-cleaning instinct has thrown out the all the frills, prints, funny bags, and chunky clogs and platform shoes that last made Chloé hot. The bags have been stripped of hardware and logos, and the footwear renovated as sidewalk-friendly caramel riding boots and springy-soled wedges. The flirty, blowy dresses, once the Chloé signature, have been axed. The hip-girl, slightly streetwise element that used to be part of the personality here was this season reduced to a mild play on western styling—a minor outbreak of leather fringing and one pair of velvet, gold-embroidered jeans that turned up in the second half.In terms of brand differentiation, though, that leaves a conundrum for buyers. Chloé's offering for Fall puts the label in direct competition with what so many others are producing now. It left some puzzlement over whether leaving the house's youth behind is such a wise move.
8 March 2010
The relaxed, slightly seventies vibe Hannah MacGibbon has been exploring at Chloé for the past few seasons is turning into a big trend. The brand's two-tone lace-up wedge boots were among last fall's It shoes, while ponchos and full trousers have popped up in several recent pre-fall collections. The designer's latest effort travels a similar path, but serves as a sophisticated update to Spring's more casual silhouettes. Menswear-inspired details were everywhere, from cropped suiting jackets to camel-hair coats to skinny tartan ankle pants paired with a shrunken wool sweater and patent leather slip-on brogues. The plaid-heavy palette was MacGibbon's ode to the English countryside, but we imagine a standout Prince of Wales check cape with a jewel-encrusted neckline would fare just as well on the city streets.
18 January 2010
One thing's for certain: There are going to be an awful lot of beige jackets and pants, khaki shirts, and colorless chiffon things to choose from—or possibly shy away from—when Spring deliveries arrive. Watching Chloé made one realize how risky it can be, in competition terms, to be on-trend, and exactly what discriminating choices store buyers will have to make between one designer's take and another's, if their selling floors aren't going to stretch like an executive dust bowl as far as the eye can see.That is not to say that Hannah MacGibbon doesn't have a personal point of view. Her take on the roomy jacket and easy trouser and the khaki button-down shirt is more boyish than most, and her girl has a refreshingly natural look—all recently washed hair and un-made-up skin. She also dispenses with the agony of high heels, preferring the comfort of flat leather walking sandals (a choice Marco Zanini, too, made at Rochas). That was fair enough, and the occasional long skirts that came with the tailoring offered a cool, different way to put things together.But then came a puzzling passage of ponchos and jodhpur-ish stirrup pants that threw up the question of which season MacGibbon was thinking about, and when the floaty, fluttery side of Chloé was going to show up. It did, eventually, in some really pretty plissé flyaway layered chiffons (of the color-free kind). Meanwhile, MacGibbon also did her duty by the house by sending out some looks, like a generic flea-market outfit of denim shirt and jeans, that trained the eye on the Chloé leather goods on offer: to wit, a series of chestnut crocodile vintage-y bags with brass turn-key fastenings, slung on long straps across the body. In all? It was a generally serviceable collection for the brand, but in a slightly minor key.
5 October 2009
From the "Love to Love You Baby" soundtrack at Zac Posen to the slinky, obi-tied jerseys at Michael Kors, there has been a discernible disco vibe to Resort 2010. Hannah MacGibbon played the flip side of the seventies at Chloé—think Annie Hall meets Laura Ashley. There were two basic looks: high-waisted pants, blouse, and jacket, or silken dresses with either puffed shoulders or pleats. If the cross-back overalls looked jejune, the lined waterproof capes, carried over from Fall, weathered the transition nicely.
15 June 2009
Chloé has been struggling to get its mojo back since Phoebe Philo departed, which is rather a long time ago now. After several swift turns of the revolving door in the design studio, Hannah MacGibbon is now at the desk, and after a somewhat rushed and skimpy debut last season, she's showing signs of getting a grip. What came out for Fall was a soft version of the early eighties, all big blanket coats, high-waisted fluid pants, wrapped belts, and, for evening, a much-needed dose of the easy glamour Chloé has been missing.MacGibbon said she'd found her bearings by looking at illustrations by Antonio Lopez. For day, she passed through khaki, beige, and loden coatings, pleated pants, and suede shorts (she's a girl who loves them), supplying enough realistic pieces to give buyers something to go on. But it was the eveningwear that took off. Her dark green velvet pants cuffed with crystal and the slouchy black velvet overalls hit a nice semi-casual note for girls who have the confidence to walk into a party in flats (albeit pretty special ones, with bows and sparkle attached). As MacGibbon notched up the formality with a one-shouldered black velvet jumpsuit with a drapey wide-hip, narrow-ankle silhouette bound with a satin cummerbund, she was hitting a spot that evoked something of Saint Laurent. There were probably too many drifty, semi-sheer dresses, but generally, this show put Chloé back on a firmer footing, especially in the footwear department. A pair of frill-cuffed, dark green suede, thigh-high pirate boots just have it in them to cause a Chloé It-object sensation, just like the old days.
10 March 2009
The Chloé girl is gravitating toward the Right Bank. Hannah MacGibbon's first pre-fall collection for the house combined eighties references like sharp shoulders, big crystal beads, and bows with a more bourgie, horsey vibe. Most striking were the double-faced plaid-lined blanket capes (shades of Hermès and Bonnie Cashin) and the carrot-legged suits, which had a citified ease.
19 January 2009
How does it feel to be finally in charge at Chloé? "Oh, it's heaven!" exclaimed a tired but exhilarated Hannah MacGibbon, the 38-year-old blond British designer who assisted Phoebe Philo from 1997 through the label's red-hot early-noughties days. Her task is to heat it back up again after several tepid seasons and reconnect with that customer who would once spare no expense to get hold of Chloé's signature sexy-girly things, trophy bags, and shoes.MacGibbon's scallop-edge coats, rounded-shoulder blouses, and high-waisted flared shorts, interspersed with ruffle-necklined dresses and jumpsuits with an eighties kind of gathered swell in the thigh region, certainly had an air of summery freshness about them. Her contrasts of chartreuse, beige, cream, bluebell, green, and a particular apricot (the exact shade that appears on Chloé packaging) were rinsed of any print and shorn of the embroidery that is a usual feature of the brand.So was there evidence here that MacGibbon holds a key to the It-ness, the spontaneous, non-intellectual-girl knack that is central to Chloé? In this first outing, some signs were promising—one of the least weird jumpsuits on any runway (a dark green silk halter); a few great pairs of pants. The shoes, ankle-strapped flats and spindly high heels in mixed leather and shiny plastic (no platforms, hooray!), were the best pacesetters since the Chloé clog stomped out the door. And the color-blocked bags with gilt frames and chains had editors scribbling ticks and stars in their notebooks.In this first collection, MacGibbon said she's aiming to "cleanse the palate" and de-complicate fashion for young women. That's going to take a while to evolve, and the designer must be given time to realign the brand identity amid our new set of economics, something Philo and she never had to worry about when they arrived at the house as twentysomethings. A bigger question is whether the company will see fit to steer Chloé back toward its origins as a prêt-à-porter label for seekers of fashion at accessible prices. At a time when "no expense spared" is fast becoming an anachronism, that would be smart.
3 October 2008
Chiffon for winter. It's undeniably a trend out there, but, in spite of climate change, still a bit of an odd one. Paulo Melim Andersson is one of its proponents, and in his case you can kind of see the logic—he's chasing what makes Chloé hot. When Karl Lagerfeld held the design reins here in the seventies, the label was famous for print-y chiffon blouses and dresses, and in its latter heyday, Phoebe Philo brought a lot of organza, eyelet, and embroidery to the party. Ergo, Chloé for Fall was a cross between the two.What Melim Andersson turned out was essentially a show of blurry, microflower prints, and haberdashery appliqués and embroideries on organza aimed at a young girl (provided she has funds in the no-worries class: Chloé prices are well up there in the luxury league). The designer layered them up with flower-print tights, broderie anglaise leggings, and the odd piece of outerwear to keep out the drafts—a black coat with short sleeves and a bodice embellished with tufty fur, a seventies coyote jacket with embroidery, and a boxy Prince of Wales "boyfriend" coat.There's no denying that Melim Andersson can do pretty things—say, an off-white trapeze sprinkled with silver stars worn over a floral blouse, or a wispy long-sleeved dress with a fluttery side trail—but still, it wasn't just the fabric that felt a bit thin in this show. In the Phoebe era, Chloé was, among other things, a go-to label for It trousers, a category Melim Andersson skipped over with a couple of pinstripe jog-pant hybrids. That's one element he could work at reconstituting in future collections. As things stood, it was left to the footwear to give a reminder of the zingy assemblage of items that are essential to the quirky Chloé knack: sexy-cool pointy stilettos with an ankle cuff, and booties with 3-D leaves climbing up the side.
29 February 2008
In a departure from the modern graphicism of his first two runway shows at Chloé, Paulo Melim Andersson looked to Saint-Germain-des-Prés' bohemian seventies heyday for pre-fall inspiration. Decadent shearlings embroidered with crystals came layered over shrunken sweaters teamed with relaxed jodhpurs, or topped drop-waist watercolor floral dresses. Layering—large floral prints with tiny calicos; thick, rich yarns over ribbed knits; and imperial purple in combination with orange, teal, and brown—was integral to the collection's opulent hippie mood, as was the costume jewelry and such accessories as brightly hued textured knits and slouchy, suede stacked-heel boots.
14 January 2008
After last season's vision of a hard-stomping girl on the Chloé runway, a slightly different spirit blew in for Spring. She made one of the season's more offbeat counterpoints to the pretty chiffon drift of fashion—it was romantic and layered, but with the retro-cuteness cauterized by an intrinsic graphic modernity. Paulo Melim Andersson's close-to-the-body, drop-waisted, flyaway patchworked dresses, which ran throughout his show, were partly abstracted, he said, from the idea of wind and sails (he's a keen sailor in his spare time.)There was something fresh in the collection, which featured a lot of painterly prints that echoed Melim Andersson's previous tenure at Marni, as well as a few rare thoughts about how to make transparency passable on a daily basis. As diaphanous as the asymmetrically tucked dresses and tiny wrapped skirts may be at first sight, each one came with some kind of under- or over-piece to ameliorate exposure issues. The top pieces were long, sleeveless blazers (a Paris trend) or long-line knits, and the under-things were chiffon leggings or shorts.If it wasn't perfect (there was a lot of repetition of that one combination of elements), by the end, there was certainly a clear image of what Chloé will be for summer. Better, there was also a sense in which this collection had reverted, in a contemporary way, to the old-time Chloé of the early seventies, when Karl Lagerfeld made it the go-to label for fashion-sensitive hippie girls. The fact that Melim Andersson managed to make this link, however tenuously, is a point in his favor. Though the memory of Phoebe Philo's recent successes at Chloé weighs heavily on his shoulders, this emerging young designer is right to start asserting a fresh point of view in his own way.
5 October 2007
Paulo Melim Andersson isn't playing it safe. His first resort collection for Chloé popped with paint-splash prints, neon color, and swirling, trippy embroideries. Dresses were flirty and way above the knee. Among the separates were ladylike blouses meant to be paired with oversize, baggy plaid shorts or wide-legged pants with the saucy slouch that Chloé girls know and love so well.
25 June 2007
Paulo Melim Andersson has big shoes—those great, chunky Chloé wedges girls have loved for years—to fill. And he's imagined a new girl to put in them: "She's angry, but funny-angry," he said before the show, "A girl who steals from her mother. I want this to be young-young, with no tricks. Clean, but not minimal."So she came over as bit of a handful, this one: a stomping little character with a taste for asymmetric black, orange, and nylon-look trash-bag fabric, rather than broderie anglaise first-communion dresses and peasant smocks. Her boots are based on Doc Martens and "Diane Arbus" galoshes, and she has a giant textured green messenger bag slung across her back like a guitar case. She likes print, texture, and off-colors too—and Melim Andersson has a lot of them, with a glossary of nutty names to match: "Secret Garden" trees, "Murder Scene" streaks, "Magpie" jeweled embroidery, and "Mushy Pea" green.Enough time has elapsed after the departure of Phoebe Philo for Chloé's pretty, vintage-y flyaway aesthetic to be in need of an update. After a long search, Melim Andersson (a British-educated Scandinavian designer whose first job was at Margiela) was hired from that other left-field girlie brand, Marni, and at this first outing something in the Marimekko-type print and square-cut, off-kilter shapes carried the traces of his former employment.The show had energy, but it's too early to judge how any newcomer will make his mark based on one collection (it took quite a few seasons for Philo to climb to the ranks of cult leader, after all). For now, the pertinent question is whether Melim Andersson gets the fact that Chloé has to be an easily broken down assemblage of fab pieces that fly out of shops. Reactions were split over that. This season label loyalists will zoom in on familiar items like the loose, orange semi-sheer dress with a drop waist and ruffled flutter in the skirt, the shifts and skirts decorated with plastic paillettes and crystal, and a few (maybe too few, since it's winter) re-cut boyfriend coat-jackets to throw on over them. What's new is that this Fall there are also lures for an edgier, tougher customer, like the slithery nylon-look bustier sheath with an unzippable collar, and a cool asymmetric sleeveless shift with volume caught into the lower back.
Is that moving Chloé out of its comfort zone, or moving it on? It's too soon to make a call on that, but it will be intriguing to watch how the real votes are counted—not on the runway, but in the stores.
2 March 2007
Since Chloé is waiting for a new designer—Paulo Melim from Marni— to arrive, the spring show was necessarily a case of keeping the brand in a holding pattern. That considered, the team did a respectably unadventurous job of keeping the best-selling items warm: fragile blouses, short Empire dresses and, of course, the shoes and bags. The theme, according to the notes, was Gloria Vanderbilt, which apparently was indicated in log-cabin patchworks (her personal hobby) and that peculiarly seventies palette of ochre, brown, and purple. Meanwhile, there's no change to report in the silhouette, and no news that moved Chloé on from the template set by Phoebe Philo some while ago. The thing this middling collection illustrated best is the gulf between imaginative design and just designing a line. Let the first go, and you are no longer in a leadership position and, in this instance, heading toward the territory occupied, at a lower price point and with more spirit, by Marc by Marc Jacobs. With the best will in the world, this is not the sort of thing people come to Paris to see.
6 October 2006
High-end fashion collections cannot be directed by committee, period. That ineluctable fact thudded onto the Chloé runway in exit one: a shapeless greige mac thrown over a frilled blouse and a pair of khaki pants hanging soggily from suspenders—a look finished with a pair of clunky bottines. Two or three more outfits—a couple of loose artist's smocks and a gray-olive wool dress layered over trousers—and it was clear that this collection was not about to snap with the vivacious, girl-friendly energy that Phoebe Philo brought to the house.It would be exaggerating to call it definitively ugly—though a pair of giant overalls and saggy-backed, folded-front turn-up pants were close calls. The trouble is more that Chloé, for so long a pacesetter of perfectly thrown-together personal style, has now inevitably decelerated into the league of followers. Without the instinctive drive of a strong designer, team-driven analysis tends to look outside, see what other people are doing, and come up with a general trend consensus. Thus, the contents of Chloé now have shades of Marc Jacobs' latest layerings (shorts over pants) and hints of Marni-cum-Yohji abstract shapes (loose-waisted, hopsacky things), while anxiously hanging on to last season's baby doll to keep up the label's continuity.In this interim period, there will certainly be pieces to keep things ticking over—the little blouses and some pretty party dresses detailed with haphazard ripples of chiffon pleats. Looking ahead, it may be impossible to replicate the exact quality of casual cool that Philo brought to this label, because that belonged to her alone. But that's not to say another designer can't do something equally exciting in their own way. To keep Chloé cooking, that change needs to happen, and fast.
3 March 2006
Phoebe's back, and you can tell. Returning after a season's maternity leave, Philo sent out a collection that put a crisp new shape, proportion, and vigor into Chloé's step. "I just wanted to do volume; something new," she said of the pristine A-line shapes and stiffer couture fabrics she used to replace the drifty layers that launched a gazillion copies last year. Now Chloé has a fresh look: It flares from the shoulder, stops above the knee, and swings leggily along on great chunky platforms.White dresses, derived from looking at sixties ruffled shirts, were intricately worked in crunchy embroidery, organza appliqués, and frills. Immaculate as confirmation outfits, they breezed airily through the trends: a baroque pattern on a smock; table-linen cutwork curlicues on a ruffled-shoulder A-line dress. To counterpoint that, Philo introduced a new structure for her tailoring, cutting neatly fitted, pressed-linen sixties coats, and stiff little cropped jackets.All this came about, she said, from her research into 1960's "old-lady chic." By the time she finished with it, of course, the "old" had thoroughly evaporated: This was a vision that will speak directly to Philo's generation of young women. One clear hint of the inspiration remained, though: the in-joke names with which she christened the new Chloé bags. There was Marge, the little snake evening purse on a silver chain; Edith, the conker-color washed-leather bag; and Gladys, the zip-laden tote. And for her own bow on the runway, Phoebe was wearing the other key accessory for spring: Lilian, the striped elastic belt.
7 October 2005
The thing about Chloé is the way it all seems to happen so naturally—the easy flow of the house style, the effortless blend of prettiness and practicality—without any of the hard-core hysterics so often attached to fashion behavior. That ethos applied in more ways than one to the handling of the fall collection, which coincided with another natural event at the house: the return of Phoebe Philo after giving birth to her daughter, Maya.After her three-month maternity leave (and glowing with health from a recent holiday in Antigua with her mother and baby), Philo watched the show from front row and loudly applauded her posse of deputies when they ran out to take a bow at the end. "I'm so touched by what they did!" she exclaimed backstage, trying to deflect attention onto the compadres who finished the collection in her absence.The clothes turned out to be an easy collage of Chloé's hot sellers: slouchy skirts with a band in the hem, neat little canvas Victorian jackets, and cool navy and black military coats, menswear pants, beautiful dresses, and a roster of the boots, shoes, and bags that cause wait-list mayhem the world over. Plus some exceptionally beautiful white lace Victorian dresses, virginal without being revoltingly cute (and bang on target for the season) to keep things ticking along.In other words, there were no hideous disappointments or fallings from grace; plenty to buy, plenty for fashion editors to love. In truth, Chloé is a brand flying so high it can afford to stay in "team" holding pattern, at least for one season. But much as Philo blushed and tried to shove the limelight away from herself, it was no use. The show served merely to add "loyalty-inspiring manager" to her string of cool achievements. From any angle, she has star quality, and in a very modern sense. No wonder her bosses are bending over backward for her. From now on, she's going to be designing from an office in London, where she can be happy: designing, managing, and being a natural mom.
4 March 2005
Phoebe Philo is hitting a spot that almost no one else manages to reach. Her unerring instinct for everything that's great to wear right now—and how to put it all together—has hit a groove of loose, effortless loveliness. And her spring collection could only be described as possessing the ineffable quality of "It."Philo's deft handling of gently gathered washed-silk skirts, riding on the hip under tiny Victorian military jackets and worn with just the right high ankle-strap shoe, made complete, sexy sense of this season. When she sent out a cream silk plissé goddess dress, she made it so breezy and casual that it could just as easily appear on the street as at a party. Dealing out the frills, she undercut ladylike fuss with a cool simplicity—in, say, a soft, pleated bib-front blouse blowing over a tiered skirt, or, for a more boyish mood, slim tux pants with a black ruffled shirt-jacket.When asked how she's making all this look so good, Philo—recently married and expecting her first baby in December—smiled and replied, with charming lack of designery grandeur: "I'm just really happy at the moment, and I think that's when you do your best work." But she's too modest. Her talent now fully blossomed, she knows exactly what to provide for any occasion in a young woman's life—whether that's dash-out-the-door practicality (a seersucker jacket and cuffed shorts, or a coat with military buttons) or unaffected evening gorgeousness (the draped green satin crystal-trimmed number that ended her show). With extra investment recently announced by parent company Richemont, this was a collection guaranteed to spread Chloé happiness round the world.
8 October 2004
Phoebe Philo hit her stride at Chloé with a neat view of how to get around the season's classic themes without ending up in middle-aged Frumpsville. Town-and-country styling, mannish trousers, camel coats, cable knits, conservative blouses, and fifties-femme dresses were all in her collection, but Philo applied a refreshing dash of girl-think to such pressing questions as, Will my butt look big in that?, and, Won't it make me look like Mom?She¿d worked out a hip way of handling horsey. A generous camel-hair wrap and a big brown-and-white striped poncho nodded toward their horse-blanket origins without making a big deal of it. With them came the new Chloé pants, an item this young woman always cuts with a scrupulous eye for the crucial back view. Her wide-leg, cuffed trousers achieved the borrowed-from-your-man look while also conspiring to flatter, a point she proved by wearing a pair herself when she appeared at the end of the show.What's nice, too, is Philo's knack for breaking up looks with her favorite little tops, like gathered-under-the-bust camisoles. They can lighten up, say, a pair of glen plaid pants or go just as well with everyday jeans. She also managed to navigate blouses, in high-necked cream lace or pin-tucked emerald satin, without making them seem insufferably prim.True, some of her retro-influenced chiffon dresses couldn't escape the inevitable comparison to Marc Jacobs. But that's true of many collections this season, and it didn't detract from Philo's breezily cool grasp of what young women really want to wear.
5 March 2004
There was one model in the Chloé show who was a dead ringer for the house’s designer, Phoebe Philo. That may have been an unconscious fluke of casting, but the clothes look like Phoebe, too. Now that she’s moved to Paris, the London girl’s references have acquired a French accent. “I went through my mum’s old fashion magazines—she had a garageful, from when my parents were living in Paris in the late seventies. That’s when I was born," she said, "and I just thought the girls looked so gorgeous, fresh, and happy.”So picture a time when French mags showed endless sunny, energetic spreads of models skipping about, laughing in accessible ready-to-wear. When wide-legged bottom-hugging trousers and jeans were cut up to the waist, wedges were in, and cheap-chic fluorescent jelly sandals were paired with short shorts, sporty striped rugby shirts, washed cotton overalls, and sloppy rolled-up work pants.Philo recaptured a lot of that feeling quite literally, in what looked like a natural reconfiguring of her knack for sexy designer denim. She also worked in the dressy, Frenchified eyelet and lace that has underpinned the label since the sixties, along with Fiorucci-era jokey banana prints for off-the-shoulder tees and swimsuits. The shoes—which under Philo’s tenure have become a house moneymaker—were a cool composite of Lucite wedge, slivers of silver leather, and macramé toe strap.At the end, Phoebe herself made a runway turn for photographers in Chloé jeans and a gauzy blue top—a far cry from her usual brief, cool, self-deprecating, British wave. Perhaps that’s a sign of her growth in confidence, but it also gave Chloé’s worldwide fans their first opportunity to get a good look at the personality who drives the brand. Cute move.
10 October 2003
Chloé may be celebrating her 45th birthday, but she looks about 27 with London girl Phoebe Philo in charge. Philo projects her own mixed-up vintage-meets-sexy-streetwear look onto the clothes, which is fine as long as she polishes things up to the Paris mark. Never one to wax philosophical about the fun of getting dressed, the designer uttered nothing more about the collection than: "What can I say? It was a little bit of everything I love doing thrown in there."Thrown in there was exactly right. What Philo appears to be loving right now included cascading ruffly chiffon, Zandra Rhodes-style; Alaïa-ish short black flounce skirts; bad-taste eighties animal-print poncho dresses; thick, orange woolly tights; and suede thigh boots. That's not to say that she didn't send plenty of the house classics down the runway, too. There were soft frocks (the staple on which Chloé built its reputation in the sixties and seventies), in a poppy print with a tie-back waistline, and a flippy two-tiered skirt. The classic girl-about-town navy coat came styled with a hoodie underneath, and jeans (unseen here since Stella McCartney moved on) made a comeback, skintight and with poppies appliquéd to the derriere and other strategic spots. A military shirt sleekly tucked into well-cut matching pants inspired a round of applause.What was missing , though, was the coherence of Philo's first few outings at Chloé. There was no graspable theme, as in Brigitte Bardot in Saint-Tropez and Keith Richards at Altamont of earlier seasons. It's not that fashion needs a narrative to be interesting, but a strand of identifying, connecting thought is what helps lift things above the level of nice clothes on a rack.
8 March 2003
Chloé designer Phoebe Philo understands the first law of provocation: never act like you're trying too hard. For spring, she trod a long-legged, high-heeled path through a collection that turned on the sex appeal without resorting to trashiness.Philo also knows how to undercut the polished taste of a French house, via a smart young woman's way of putting things together. She used conventionally proper materials like navy chiffon, pale suede, black satin and a Spanish-influenced print to make little dresses with a lot of impact. Some were decorated with silver bobbles, to shiver as the wearer walks, others prettily embellished with brass flowers. Instead of being tartily clinging and revealing, Philo's tops were fluted and flew open at the neckline in a subtly undone way. She handled the obligatory leg-show with cuffed shorts and with low-slung skirts in gauzy fabrics, while the signature Chloé swimwear came in dressed-up two-pieces, tied around the body with beaded strings and trailing flirty little scarves.Feminine and coolly accessorized with matching bags, this was a collection cleverly calculated to make men want to tear the clothes off a girl—in the nicest possible way, of course.
5 October 2002
In her second season as Chloé design head, Phoebe Philo hit a lanky, confident stride. For Fall 2002, she gave sexy vitality to leg-lengthening pants, curvy jackets, chiffon tops and refined Sergeant Pepper style military coats, while never laying the retro/vintage theme on too thick.Philo did velvet flares, gray-washed jeans with military buttonhole details, and an easy, slouchy man’s pant. She even cut schoolboy shorts in a low-slung way that avoided any association with cutesy hot pants. And, in the teeth of competition from pretty much every designer around, she turned out the best biker pants in town. Done in worn-looking gray-brown leather and cropped just below the knee, they were shown with the spindliest stiletto-heeled pumps—the killer kicker. For the top half, Philo turned her attention to jackets and coats with something special about them, and brought new energy to Chloé’s long-held reputation for chiffon pieces. Her black military tailcoats and jackets with flowered appliqués and Indian embroideries channeled a boho-60's eclecticism without looking like dusty fleamarket finds. For evening, she added sparkle by running silver bugle beads in strips or streamers from the shoulders of layered chiffon tops and tunics in patterns inspired by Leon Bakst.In short: top marks to Philo for staying true to her young Brit-girl instincts, while respecting—and living up to—Parisian standards of design.
11 March 2002
Phoebe Philo proved herself quite capable of taking over the creative reigns of a major house like Chloé.Avoiding in-your-face rock ’n’ roll attitude, Philo blurred the distinction between day and evening wear with breezy separates inspired by ’70s Saint Tropez, Brigitte Bardot, and Talitha Getty. A sense of easygoing elegance permeated everything from fitted tops with intricately worked sleeves to lace-trimmed camisoles and fabulous monkey-appliqué bathing suits. A long suede skirt with blush gray and black panels exuded earthy chic, as did the Moroccan-style beaded bags and sandal-boots in aged gold leather.Die-hard Chloé fans will be glad to know that there are still plenty of high-impact sexy staples to be had. The low-slung flared pants with flirty cutouts at the hips, pinafore shorts, summery minidresses and punchy T-shirts with net backs are likely to keep cash registers working overtime.
9 October 2001
Stella McCartney continued with her exploration of grown-up, couture-inspired silhouettes for Chloé, without forgetting about the youthful, fun-loving basics that are the label's bread and butter.McCartney's forte is her ability to glam up casual street clothes. Her fitted jeans and corduroy trousers with zipper pockets, face-stenciled T-shirts and pearl-encrusted draped tops all had an air of insouciant cool to them; so did the faux furs with shaved bits that accommodated clusters of silver flowers. However, when McCartney turned to complicated floor-length skirts, boned coats and tie-up corsets, the show took a turn for the heavy-handed. Sea-grass embroidery growing on the side of trousers or completely claiming a dress or coat added a more dynamic air to the collection.
13 March 2001
VH1/Vogue Fashion AwardsDesigner of the Year 2000 Stella McCartney certainly did not disappoint her legions of fabulous young fans who rely on Chloé for the season’s hot new trends. But this season, in addition to delivering sexy new T-shirts and plunging bathing suits (with playful pineapple motifs), McCartney explored grown-up territory. Perhaps drawing inspiration from Schiaparelli’s inventive chic, McCartney worked graphic horse prints (borrowed from Stubbs and Géricault) into loosely structured diagonal-seam dresses and beautiful jackets with a softly draped triangle shoulder. Skirts were long and relaxed, perfect when paired with lightweight, flouncy off-the shoulder tops. Wide-brim hats and dainty pillboxes with a tulle overlay gave the look a touch of ’30s sophistication. More casual pieces included sexy jeans with zipper pockets and metallic horses galloping along the backside, and a T-shirt with strategically placed banana appliqués in the front and the words “Keep your bananas off my melons” in the back.This was a very strong collection for McCartney, and one that confirms her considerable talent and potential as a major designer.
10 October 2000
VH1/Vogue Fashion AwardsDesigner of the Year nominee for her Chloé collection, Stella McCartney drew inspiration from her own childhood memories of the '70s and '80s. And since the self-proclaimed "Rock Princess'" impressionable years moved to a disco beat, so did this racy collection. The sexy, fun-loving Chloé gals strutted their stuff at the Opèra Garnier to the raunchiest soundtrack to rock the runways in years.Stella set the tone for the collection with short, batwing-sleeved jersey disco dresses, trellised with Art Deco beading—all set for Studio 54. Inspired by the allure of a girl shrugging her "boyfriend's secondhand coat" over a skimpy dress, Stella provided wintry cover-up in off-white "Afghan lamb" fake fur."Deco" seen through '70s eyes—hink Biba, that pacy fashion and style emporium—appeared in ombré-shaded lozenge prints and in silky jersey pieces, as well as in the crisply tailored wool coats that have become a Stella signature. There was more '20s influence in the Josephine Baker-style clasps, threaded with lengths of silk ribbon cord that belted satin tops or hipsters, and in the lush beaded trim on hot chocolate, jade green and navy.Quirky, too, were the deluxe knitting bags, transformed from the prosaic via dense beading of hand-cut feather-shaped sequins. This embroidery later appeared fringing the sleeves of mini shifts—and as entrance-making jackets and coats—like "plastic fake fur," enthused Sean Lennon, who joined Stella's ever-supportive dad Paul McCartney in the audience.
29 February 2000
The grandiose Musée du Petit Palais served as the setting for Stella McCartney’s sensual collection. Fringed, frayed, ecru denim pieces opened the show, accessorized by white boots with high heels and bold ankle cuffs. A series of interesting embroidered pieces followed—delicate colored thread formed figures of women and animals on skirts, jeans, and jackets. The collection’s underlying theme of subtle opulence was underscored by the hand-painted jerseys, diamond-embroidered pieces and 24-K-gold chains that held together some tops or served as blouses. For McCartney’s customer, luxury, evidently, comes naturally.
5 October 1999
Editor’s Note: When we talk about Y2K in fashion we talk about a look, but it’s 1999 that is the turning point. As Nicole Phelps turns her attention to this special year, we are adding five archival shows to the archive.Stella McCartney’s third collection for Chloé, for spring 1999, had a sizzling sexiness, but more transgressive than Gisele’s lace tunic or Aurelie’s teeny bikini, was the way that the designer played with ideas of good taste. She took a “low” technique, the kind of spray-painted palm tree and sunset scenes typical of tacky tourist merchandise, and reframed them within the heritage of a French luxury house.
26 August 2024
Editor’s Note: When we talk about Y2K in fashion we talk about a look, but it’s 1999 that is the turning point. As Nicole Phelps turns her attention to this special year, we are adding five archival shows to the archive.Vintage jackets, jeans with snarling tigers bedazzled on the backside, and shimmering sequins defined Stella McCartney’s fall 1999 collection for Chloé.
26 August 2024