The outbreak of fevered emotion ripping through the shows in Paris has caused standing ovations galore, though it’s much less about being carried away by the clothes—as it was in the olden days—than it is about the raging virus of speculation over who’s leaving which brand, where they’re going, and who’ll take their place. This despite the fact that not a single announcement about any change has been made at the time of writing.
Anyway, as a record of fact, there was one of those at the end or Chemena Kamali’s spring Chloe show. It had been a collection mainly of things made of eyelet lace, with a few examples of tailoring and eight huge raincoat silhouettes topped with conceptual sou’westers.
At a preview, she’d said: “I felt very much about wanting to just do everything I love for Chloe, and really make it about all my obsessions. Not overthinking it too much, and really going for that instinctive love, and all my creative fixations.”
On her desk were two giant antique tomes of Broderie Anglaise samples from defunct French and Swiss manufacturers. Eyelet (in US terminology) was always a characteristic fabric choice of Chloe’s founder Gaby Aghion in her first collections in the 1950s. Images from around that time were on Kamali’s research boards, but one’s appreciation of the extent to which the use of this type of crisp, very French fabric has been integral to Chloe’s French-girl iconography can be rewarded by a deep scroll through Vogue Runway’s shows. Drink in the examples designed by Clare Waight Keller for spring 2015 and Phoebe Philo’s spring 2002: they’re just sensational reminders of how important Chloe has been in raising talented young women designers.
Kamali stands in that tradition, and she went all-out with the fabric this time, beginning with trimming it into square, bateau and heart-shaped necklines, embellishing it with swinging tassels, and then producing whole ‘jeune fille’ Victorian—via the 1970s—nightdressy smocks.
Then she went further, using 3D flower-encrusted quipure lace for baby-doll type trapeze dresses in black or white, and sending out a cutaway late 1960s-style white-petaled couture-type bathing suit. She ended by snipping away the bodies of lace blouses until they resembled vestigial lingerie harnesses. It was her best touch—sexy, contemporary—glimpsed under white tailoring and topping her pouf-y chiffon wedding-skirted finale.
On her boards were a couple of photos of Stella McCartney’s spring 1999 tailoring for Chloe too. Kamali has kept up the brand’s reputation for the Chloe high-rise boot-cut pant, a perma-classic pillar of the business. Her cluster of tailored jumpsuits added a little more to the tradition.
Her love of the huge, tiered fisherman coat and its kinky sister, the layered see-thru caped mac ties into to another personal bond, her adoration of the 1980s work of her late German compatriot Karl Lagerfeld.
In common with so many shows this season, Kamali’s was one of those simple repeat, repeat expositions of a house message. Was there a more coded personal message behind it—a farewell—that her front row of VIPs and friends of the house knew about, or were they on their feet clapping her for so long because they just love her? When Kamali ran out, smiling in her white Broderie Anglaise blouse and jeans, it remained impossible to tell either way.