Backstage after her Paris catwalk show, Chemena Kamali talked passionately about the Chloé look – the high-waisted jeans, the sun-bleached vintage blouses, the sensuality and easy femininity, the seductive cocktail of nostalgia and promise in a beloved sundress packed for its umpteenth summer holiday – without once using the word boho.
But to everyone else, Kamali is the second coming of boho. Kamali, an unknown name when she arrived at Chloé as creative director a year ago, has established herself as one of the most powerful people in fashion by single handedly bringing back a style beloved for being instantly recognisable, with a through line from Jane Birkin to Sienna Miller, and easy to wear.
Kamali prefers to call her clothes “the spirit of the 70s, the era of revolution and liberation. Aesthetically, it is about natural beauty and undoneness. The real longing is for the spirit in the clothes. It gets labelled, but it’s not a trend, it’s a state of mind.”
For her second Chloé collection, she doubled down on classics of that era – white tailoring over gauzy camisoles, cork wedge sandals – adding rose prints revived from a 1977 Chloé collection by then designer Karl Lagerfeld on floaty dresses and one-piece swimsuits. The silhouette of a puff-sleeved blouse, a Chloé house icon, was built out into a swingy spring jacket.
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Whatever you call it, this is a look that women still want to wear. The front row was packed with floor-grazing Chloé trousers, heeled knee-high boots, tinted sunglasses and beach-loose long hair. The ultimate question in deciding whether a look would make the final cut, Kamali said, was “do I believe in this girl? Is this a woman I might know?”
It would be a stretch to suggest that mousseline bloomers, as seen in this show, are clothes for real life. But what Kamali captures is a look that feels authentically like a woman’s daydream, rather than a man’s fantasy. Asked how she felt about Kamala Harris choosing to wear two Chloé looks at the recent Democratic convention, she said: “It didn’t surprise me. Chloé resonates with a lot of incredible women.” The greatest compliment to her clothes, the designer recently told Vogue, “is when a woman says she enjoyed her evening, because she felt good and she felt comfortable”.
Balmain, where Olivier Rousteing has been creative director for 13 years, is not about to jump on the boho bandwagon. Backstage before his show, Rousteing put his longevity down to the fact that “I am not on trend and never have been”. The shiny jackets with shark fin shoulder pads and miniskirts clamped tight at the waist were out of step with a world then in thrall to Phoebe Philo’s minimalism at Celine when he sent them out on to his first catwalk, he said, but were a hit nonetheless, and he has stuck with them. “When you see someone in the street with my shoulder pads, I want you to recognise it as Balmain.”
Balmain brought together Brigitte Macron and Cardi B in the front row, for a show where models in their 50s, 60s and 70s mingled with twentysomethings. “When I came here in 2011 I was the only black designer at a French luxury house, and building inclusivity has been a mission for me. One of my fights is about age. Beauty is for everyone – all skin tones, and all ages.”
