Runway Rundown: Chloé’s Powerful Prettiness, Schiaparelli’s Surprising Ease And Vetements Taping
Should you want proof of the impact that Chloé’s Chemena Kamali has had on fashion in the one season since she took the helm of the house, look not to the catwalks of Paris Fashion Week but to any high-street fashion store near you. It might not be as luxuriously or exactingly executed but you can’t deny the handwriting of her crowd-pleasing Chloé is everywhere; cascading ruffles, fluttering chiffons, sun bleached colours. Boho is no longer a dirty word.
There is something radical about the romance that Kamali proposes. For her SS25 show during PFW she doubled down on the romance and whimsy via flou shirting, puffy bubble hems, crochet onesies, wafty cami dresses and lace-trimmed knickerbockers (less likely to be seen on the possible next POTUS than the languid tailored trouser suits – but in 2024, you truly never know). Why does it resonate? Besides there being a compelling argument that sometimes you just want something uncomplicatedly appealing and really, really pretty to wear, she also captures the hankering for nostalgia running through fashion right now.
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And nostalgia done right is layered; what the past looks like is subjective, memory is ever shifting and evolving. Sure, the Chloé SS25 collection might take its lead from Karl Lagerfeld’s late-1970s collections for the maison, but it also draws on memories-of-memories: namely the early-Noughties interpretation of 1970s dressing (see: Chloé girl incarnate, Sienna Miller) and the double-whammy allure of freedom and escapism.
Freedom feels at once a pedestrian and outlandish desire in 2024. Like duh, we’re a quarter way through the 21st century, of course we want and expect freedom – but also, yikes, as if. So, it’s not surprising that freedom is emerging, sometimes abstractedly and sometimes explicitly, as a recurring motif in the SS25 shows.
‘The world may feel more chaotic than ever, but here, the mood is celebratory: both of what fashion can be, but of how fashion can make you feel,’ wrote Daniel Roseberry in his Schiaparelli show notes. He too was thinking about the layers of nostalgia – how the time we are in now will eventually be past. ‘At the beginning of this collection, we decided we were going to make clothes not just clients, but for their daughters and granddaughters’. He called the collection, shown on Place Vendome where the Schiaparelli HQ is and with Kylie Jenner in attendance, Future Vintage.
Schiaparelli is first and foremost a couture house, and Roseberry’s challenge in the ready-to-wear is to translate the eccentricity and surrealism that is integral to the maison’s look and lore to a different mode without diluting the essence. Here he pulled it off by infusing the bizarre brio of his haute couture with an effortless spirit. Wardrobe archetypes – shirt dresses, jeans, trench coats – were amplified with signature strange Schiap touches like measuring tape embroidery, padlock clasps and trompe-l’oeil toes. The world is weird, go with it.
Rick Owens has achieved icon status through being a provocateur. His collections have freedom and acceptance built into them, granting the wearer permission to be a commanding, perverse, striking. To wear Rick is to own looking like a bit of weirdo (that’s a compliment) in some circles, and one of the gang in like-minded ones. You choose. This season he amplified the message of acceptance by casting his friends, colleagues and fashion students in his noble, imperious Palais de Tokyo show. Given that there is an inching backwards in terms of diversity on the catwalks, it’s emboldening to see a designer of Owens’ stature celebrating it.
Harris Reed, the London-based American in Paris, was thinking about the freedom afforded by travel at Nina Ricci (he is one of the designers who continues to make diverse casting choices). Taking his cue from the jet-set glitterati of the 1960s and 1970s – Jackie O and Brigitte Bardot were namechecked – Reed proposed nifty tailoring, cute shifty dresses and saucer sunnies, with a lavish smattering of the house’s signature polka dots and bows. If not subdued, it did feel like a quieter collection from showman Reed, indicative of the freedom of growing up.
And what of the freedom to declare whatever the hell you want to be luxury? That’s what Vetements’ Guram Gvasalia, and his Balenciaga creative director brother Demna, have always done. Rips and tears? Mud splatters? Courier T-shirts? Crisp packet or bin liner bags? All up to task for the Gvasalias and their provocative challenging of taste. Another inclusive caster in Paris – Law Roach (whose savvy placement of a Vetements’ Titanic hoodie established Celine Dion as a surprise style queen in 2016), Marcia Cross, Travis Scott and a pregnant Carmen Kass all walked the Vetements show – drew many a Balenciaga reference, where his brother is currently creative director – just see the lurid floral dresses and the DHL tape dress Gigi Hadid wore, reminiscent of the Balenciaga safety tape dress Kim Kardashian wore to the AW22 show (and jumpsuit Lizzo wore on the September 2022 cover of ELLE UK). It felt like the kind of ribbing only a brother could pull off.
Later that evening Hadid was making waves in a very different type of dress, this time a tucked and draped ‘algae green’ gown on the Victoria Beckham runway. In a collection that was about the intimacy of getting dressed, the designer explored the blurred lines between body and garment; slashed tailoring, second-skin stocking bodysuits, moulded bodices were just a few of the toplines from her most conceptual collection to date. Less about looking outwards as inwards – to the very personal relationship women have with their bodies and the clothes we put on them, either to shroud or to amplify – the freedom in a Beckham collection is always about defying the odds.
They said a pop star couldn’t be a designer. Well, just look. One of the most brilliant things about Beckham is the dedication with which she applies herself, the work she puts in. There is an authenticity in that which resonates – no doubt the Netflix doc currently being made about her will confirm that.
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