The lightness of being: a new mood comes to Paris
A lighter mood, still grounded in reality, comes to Paris.
There must be some kind of fashion word for a tangible shift in the winds. After seasons of minimalism, Chemena Kamali made the kind of debut at Chloe that changes things up.
The Chloe girl, the It girl flitting about in lacy blouses and trailing ruffles and high-waisted jeans and clonky platform wedges, is back.
Yes indeed, so too is boho chic.
But perhaps we clocked this with the presence of Sienna Miller in the front row at the show, the ultimate and eternal “It” girl – the one who convinced you in the mid-aughts to wear an ethereal hippy thing cinched with jangly coin belts and cowboy boots – in the must-have Chloe cork wedges with a floaty white dress and leather jacket. It was the kind of outfit you’d immediately try to recreate with varying degrees of success.
Kamali, who has worked for Chloe twice before (including under Phoebe Philo, another Chloe alumni) described her debut collection as her “Intuition” collection.
“You know, it’s how it makes you feel and how you want to feel,” she told Vogue 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.”
While the show had shades of the ’70s, it didn’t feel like raiding the dress-up box. It just felt like, well, now.
Another brand to feel like now was Loewe. Jonathan Anderson, who is not only the creative director of Spanish fashion house Loewe but also his own brand, JW Anderson, somehow manages to outdo himself in terms of creativity each season.
He is, as Vogue noted, at the top of his game. His new collection was full of great ideas but, more importantly, excellent clothes.
This included the cutaway floral and vegetable printed jersey dresses cinched in with built-in belts, immaculate tailoring and dog printed dress, ballooning trousers tempered with fabulous woolly bouclé collared vests and accessories that will be veritable catnip (and obvious dollar magnets).
The inspiration for the show was Anderson’s interest in the artwork and decorative objects rich society types dwelling in Upper East Side New York collected in the 1920s – fancy china, tapestry embroideries of pets, Chippendale furniture, loads of chintz. He took particular interest in the small landscapes and floral depictions of American painter Albert York.
“I started exploring this idea of provenance and why we buy things and why things come to have meaning,” Anderson told reporters backstage. “The idea of an outsider looking into a world that we don’t experience.”
The same could be said, of course, of the rest of us viewing the fashion collections of luxury fashion houses. Even if we never wear Anderson’s clothes we can take from them lessons in style and decoration, his mediations on class and wealth, of acquisition and provenance, and of how the ordinary can become extraordinary when you take a closer look.
The idea of dressing for real life was a theme running throughout the shows this season – in pinched times women want clothes that work with their everyday. But that doesn’t mean they want boring things.
Take Virginie Viard at Chanel, this season she continued her essential mode - that of making chic and elegant clothes for women on the go- with silhouettes that nodded to both the ‘20s and the ‘70s.
This theme was explored at Rabanne where the maximalist-minded Julien Dossena took inspiration from the women he observed catching the Metro in Paris to work every day. The way real women mixed and matched their pieces.
His mixing of tartan and cardigans, leopard print with jacquard, sequins with leather, offered a tempered and textural take on dressing with nonchalance and really pulling it off. There was this feeling of mix-and-match at Dries Van Noten too, sweatpants worn with a black sequinned shirt that had a train, incredible colour combinations. It looked confident, in the way someone with real personal style does.
At surrealist fashion house Schiaparelli, creative director Daniel Roseberry was also grappling with what women want to wear now – and how some of his more outre haute couture creations must be rendered for day-to-day (albeit still fabulous) living.
What this distilled into were tailored suits with a little more ease to them, worn with faux-hair ties, and check cropped jackets with hand motif buttons. There were dresses with a trompe l’oeil detail, and puffer jackets with nipple buttons. “What they want from us is still this humour, this creativity, but made effortless,” Roseberry explained.
Maria Grazia Chiuri at Dior was, as ever, interested in women and how they live their lives.
This season, Grazia Chiuri took inspiration from Miss Dior, not the perfume, but the separate ready-to-wear collection and Parisian boutique the haute couture house launched in the ’60s under then creative director Marc Bohan.
“I’m very fascinated by this collection, and this moment of Mr Bohan’s history,” Chiuri said at a preview. “I think he was really visionary for the time because the couture house was in difficulty. They had this relationship only with these couture clients – and women were changing. Not all the couture-house creative directors were so visionary to understand the new era, and new women.”
As Grazia Chiuri well heeded too, Bohan was one of the first to render a logo on to scarves, shoes and bags. Modish nods to the ’60s could be found throughout the collection, including block-heeled Mary Janes (as covetable now as then) and miniskirts (ditto).
A glinting chicness could be found at Louis Vuitton, with turtleneck jumpers paired with embellished skirts and fringed chiffon sleeves on bomber jackets.
Meanwhile at Valentino, Pierpaolo Piccioli pulled things right back to black – sending out 63 looks in black as a kind of reset and one that belies the details and the exquisite fabrics used throughout, from the little tunic jackets and shorts to lacy evening gowns.
A much talked-about moment of Paris Fashion Week was another debut, Sean McGirr at Alexander McQueen.
It is no easy thing to follow in the footsteps of genius, as is McGirr’s mantle as the new creative director of Alexander McQueen. Alexander “Lee” McQueen, as he was known, was a gifted tailor and storyteller. His clothes told dark and subversive tales that at the time were often reviled and later became folklore. Being there is now the stuff of fashion legend. Following McQueen’s suicide in 2010, his right-hand woman, Sarah Burton, took on the role and added understanding of what women want. She gave women grace and power with her cuts and silhouettes.
McGirr’s collection paid homage to both, with elements of his own background and a winky subversiveness that showed he had done his research. It’s easy to forget it can take time to find your groove though, the fast-moving fashion world could do well remembering that.
Something blessedly not fast-moving is the pointy world of uber luxury. At Hermes, Nadège Vanhee gave the Hermes woman exactly what she wants in variations of nubby, leather outerwear. This ran the full, luxurious gamut from cropped vests in tomato soup red to louche burgundy leather jumpsuits and leather jackets trimmed with ostrich feathers. All of it will be snapped up by the Hermes customer. Indeed, according to the French house’s most recent results these very customers allowed Hermes to post revenue of €3.36bn ($5.6bn) for the last three months of 2023, up 17.5 per cent at constant exchange rates from the same period the year prior. It is a defiance of the much discussed slowdown in luxury and a reminder that this particular customer lives in a buttery-soft leather world that is different to most.
Paris Fashion Week concludes this week, with Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Miu Miu still to show.
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