Chemena Kamali took the opportunity to dive into the season and change things up a bit at Chloé. “We’re living through such a unique moment in fashion history,” she said in a conversation during fittings. “There are all these huge changes, but also a possibility to kind of reinvent things. You look at your colleagues and peers, and it’s very exciting, inspiring to see how different creatives are using the DNA of brands and making them their own.”
Kamali has taken up the baton of the ‘Chloé Girl’ house tradition and very much made the drifty, hippy chiffon vaguely 1970s dress a central pillar of the business. This season she went back further for inspiration to Gaby Aghion, Chloé’s founder who, in the 1950s and ’60s, made dresses in bubbly couture shapes and fabrics, but Kamali “took out all the stiffness and the petticoats.” There are photos of the first Chloé shows taking place in the Café de Flore, so that journalists could see and touch the clothes, and have a nice breakfast into the bargain.
Seeing those shapes and the prints inspired Kamali to look at 1950s swimwear, the brightness and positivity of splashy florals, and to start draping with them. “I was thinking, ‘how can we make it light, and how can we make something that felt a little bit more spontaneous, less rigid?’” Kamali said she was back in her comfort zone with draping—she spent her first years after graduating from Central Saint Martins MA working for Alberta Ferretti, Italy’s queen of romantic, floaty dresses,
Having sourced some vintage ’60s prints—a riot of roses and a vaguely Hawaiian one, she began “draping and pleating and wrapping and knotting, to make dresses and skirts that feel more airy and spontaneous for the girls today.”
Her show had bounce and colour—and bags inspired by ’50s swimming caps, plus heels as hybrid pool slides. In the fittings, models liked the bodies so much that Kamali turned them into a fun ’60s-style Chloé swim collection.
Later in the show she reverted to a more classically Chloé palette—sand, almond, lemon, and coffee, used in the more day to evening section of the collection. Cocooning anoraks, cropped blouses, sarong-like skirts, and big duster coats appeared along the way. “I’ve been think how to expand Chloé without betraying anything,” Kamali concluded. “I want to make sure there’s a moving on, that something’s evolving. We’re sort-of pushing the boundaries of what Chloé is.”
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