Chloé has a backstory this season that can’t be beat. Clare Waight Keller discovered Anne-France Dautheville, a fabulous-looking Frenchwoman who traveled across Europe and through the Middle East on a motorbike in the 1970s. In a book about her journey, Dautheville wrote, “I went around the world, because, in the end, it was just a little further. Because time ceased to exist, and the fleeting moments of chance encounters along the way were the only thing that mattered.” It could be a manifesto for our plugged-in age. Waight Keller has turned Chloé into a top brand through her keen appreciation of the wanderlust in so many of us. We want to channel the festival girl and the free-spirited biker chick precisely because the reality is we spend our days hunched over our phones, developing text neck and complaining about our fading eyesight. We’d like to feel the wind whipping through our hair.
There was a direct link between vintage photos of Dautheville and Waight Keller’s new collection. Look 4 was a very literal interpretation of a motocross jacket and pants. It was a one-off. More often, Waight Keller combined the Chloé froth—the ruffled silk and lace tops and dresses that are the brand’s stock-in-trade—with more hard-driving pieces, or über-luxe versions of them at least. A romantic white silk blouse was remixed with black leather pants roomy enough to ride in, and the hippiest of her hippie dresses was topped by an everywoman fleece actually cut from shearling. The show’s high-low vibes are a timely evolution of the typically high-high Chloé aesthetic, one in keeping with the streetwise sensibility trickling up from labels like Vetements, that still feels true to the brand.
A pair of black leather salopettes worn over one of those souped-up fleeces is destined to be the collection’s most popular look, precisely because it’s something we could believably wear while pecking away at our devices. But there was no shortage of dresses to make us dream: a white caftan densely embroidered with pearl buttons and other colorful bits and bobs, and Frederikke Sofie’s tufted trapeze dress, so light it seemed to float around her.
Dautheville is in her 70s now. If Waight Keller and co. know what they’re doing, they’ll publish an English edition of her book and take it on the road. We can see a Chloé biker-girl gang causing a real stir at Coachella or Glastonbury. If it happens, we’d sign up to tag along.
