Chloé's creative director, Clare Waight Keller, is only on her second collection for the house, but she's working with a steady hand. For pre-fall, she looked to the photos of Garry Winogrand, whose candid shots of Manhattanites on the avenues in the sixties are proto-street-style shots if there ever were any. But unlike the ultra-practiced subjects of today's street-style brigade, their predecessors dressed with a certain spontaneity. "A mishmash," Waight Keller called it, and she appropriated it for the line.
The designer spoke of catching the moment when the sixties, with its prints and graphicism, shaded into the lounge-y, flowy seventies—classic Chloé, in other words, with fluid dresses picking up Spring's pleat motif. She drove home the hither-and-thither point with proportions that ebbed and flowed: billowing, pleated trousers with matching shrunken jackets and cropped sweaters, cocooning coats with floppy, rolled-up sleeves over skintight pants. That giant coat might be overwhelming to some, but Waight Keller insisted on its ease. "It's like a cardigan," she said. Whether you'll see it on the streets or not, you surely will find it in fashion editorial pages. Chloé's salespeople, on the other hand, will swoon for her reversible shearling teddy (shown, cleverly, and in a typical Waight Keller move, over a matching gilet for a trompe l'oeil effect). It married mishmash to polish.
