The fashion industry fell hard for Natacha Ramsay-Levi’s debut. In one fell swoop, she definitively moved Chloé away from the festival-chick-on-holiday vibes of her predecessor. Ramsay-Levi’s are not clothes for Glastonbury. They’re for wearing to the Frieze Art Fair or a fashion happening, places where people make studies of outfits (the ones doing the wearing and the ones doing the watching) and, in that studying, are charmed.
At a preview of her second collection earlier this week, Ramsay-Levi name-checked actresses of a ’70s vintage like Anjelica Huston, Sissy Spacek, Isabelle Huppert, and Stéphane Audran—she’s well-versed in cinema—and spoke of the magnetism of their auras. She set out to conjure something similar. “I want her to be very strong, but you can’t really reach her,” Ramsay-Levi said. Her process was to take quite straightforward bourgeois pieces—like a shirtdress, say—and de-normalize them. She did it by removing shirt buttons and creating a skin-baring, open-V neckline accentuated by a long pendant necklace; by dropping the waist; by adding knife pleats or embroideries; and, sometimes, by placing substantial cut-outs at the hip. There was a lot of skin-baring in the collection, a feature that is more easily pulled off on the runway than in real life. Balancing her experimental, editorial inclinations were savvy details; the Chloé logo socks looked like money in the bank, as did the chunky jewelry.
Second collections are harder than the first, especially when a designer has set the bar so high for herself. Ramsay-Levi didn’t hold back here. Rather, this collection seemed more ambitious than her first: longer by 10 exits and more “worked”—with those cut-outs, with long goat-hair trim, with multi-layered looks. Chloé has been many things over the course of its many designers, but it has always been woman-friendly in the sense that the clothes had a certain French ease. Ramsay-Levi’s best looks here—an elongated blazer worn with soft jodhpur joggers, a full-sleeved chunky ribbed knit paired with a lace-inset pleated skirt, an unstructured trench, a terrific fur embroidered with the little horses from season one—achieved that. Her flares will be hot commodities if the tricky hip-crease zips are removed. With considered tweaks, these clothes could be not only cinematic but pragmatic. It’s in that mix where sales are made.
