With each passing season under the stewardship of Clare Waight Keller, the creative director of Chloé, there is often a swing between soft and hard, the girlish and the boyish. But this Fall there was perhaps an injection of a new element: something wild. The coherence and boyish discipline, together with the pretty-prettiness of Chloé, was given an additional jolt with the wild and woolly today.
Fabrics and textures are always very well done at Chloé, but this season they were particularly effective, with added warmth—both literally and metaphorically. There was a notion of letting loose in those printed wild-cat furs with additional rainbow tufting, an element that was echoed by a rainbow leopard-spot jacquard. Waight Keller also showed tangled fringing; delicate, shaggy, cut silk jacquards; and mid-heeled sheepskin ankle-strap shoes that were particularly compelling. In short, the Chloé muse seems to have gone a bit off her head for Fall—and she was better for it, needing to ease up a bit after last season's lesson in contempo French girl style.
All of this was managed with an insouciant attitude—the Chloé girl still had polish. "She's wilder and more mysterious," said Waight Keller. "She has an urban mystery." She also has a rather nice array of pillowy, padded leathers to protect herself from the elements in this urban jungle, to cloak all of the pretty silk chiffon and georgette pieces. As well as those great leather shorts that have become such a Chloé staple. The Fall collection was all rather playful, pretty, and perverse—it might have had the element of the wild cat, but she purrs rather than roars for Chloé.
