PARIS — Nearly half a century ago, when Karl Lagerfeld was the creative director of Chloé, his houseguests included the artist Antonio Lopez and the artist’s muses Pat Cleveland and Jerry Hall, and the pictures they made together resonate down the decades. Cleveland and Hall were front row centre at the Chloé show on Thursday afternoon. Chemena Kamali couldn’t have wished for better backup for her debut. It was such a clear co-relative of her intent to recapture the brand’s Lagerfeld-designed glory days.
When I met her in January, I was busy remembering a Guy Bourdin shoot from French Vogue which featured Lagerfeld’s creations in a romantic 18th century scenario. There was an acreage of white lace and a musketeer’s rapier piercing a pillowy breast. Kamali knew exactly the image I was talking about. She located it in a book in a heartbeat. The woman knows her Chloé. In fact, she’d already decided to made that particular 1977 season of the brand the foundation of her first collection. Easy to see why. It embodied everything she wanted to say: lightness, fluidity, ease, with an unapologetic indulgence in radical romance of the lacy, ruffled variety — now with added musketeer boots and highwayman’s capes.
Over the past 20 years, Kamali worked under three creative directors at Chloé, so she has had a lot of time to think about her own blueprint. Her instinct to take it back to the years when founder Gaby Aglion gave Lagerfeld complete freedom felt right. There’s nothing like that idea around right now. And, from the moment a floodtide of white ruffles tucked under a cropped leather cape stalked onto her catwalk, Kamali exulted in it.
That cape was the collection’s foundation, in a curt leather crop or an eruption of tiered georgette, in a parson’s sober wrap or various iterations — vinyl, gabardine — of the highwayman’s cape. Capacious volumes also shaped sweeping plaid coats. The counterpoints were the flou and the lace. Helmut Newton’s photos of the seminal 1977 collection on Kamali’s mood board managed to find a brazen nudity in Lagerfeld’s lace. Those were plainly more libertine times, and, according to Kamali, their story hasn’t been told enough.
I love the notion that she might be prepared to tell it. Chloé shouldn’t be a polite collection.
When Lagerfeld endorsed romance in 1977, he insisted that didn’t mean sweet or cute. Kamali agrees. This could be really good.
