At Chloé today, postcards showcasing some of Karl Lagerfeld’s key collections for the house were placed on every seat as a tribute to the designer who passed away last week. On the back of each card were printed Lagerfeld’s comments about his work. He was a man of many words, and he designed at Chloé for 25 years, but something he said about an iconic 1975 collection resonated today. “The essence of modern dressing—unstructured, weightless, [and] totally feminine.”
Four decades later, that notion sums up the Chloé aesthetic just about perfectly, and Natacha Ramsay-Levi nailed it this season, with an array of the kind of breezy but polished dresses that women have looked to Chloé for since Karl’s days. The orangish-red wrap style in a silk jacquard wallpaper pattern was extra charming with navy embroidered Cs scalloping the edge of its skirt. Its sister dresses were mostly shorter, often with asymmetrical hems and volume through the shoulders and sleeves that transmitted a—yes—modern kind of ease. Ramsay-Levi sent them out with mid-heel boots (her boots from last Fall are everywhere at Paris Fashion Week) that accentuated the cool attitude.
There was more going on here, however, than billowy dresses. Ramsay-Levi has made attenuated, sometimes quirky tailoring part of her vocabulary since she arrived at Chloé. Those horse-embroidered corduroys have also had a good run IRL. For Fall, her trouser silhouette was a utility-cargo-hybrid bootcut, long and lanky; in denim, she showed them with a deep cuff. A military topcoat and cropped pants were cut in a Prince of Wales crepe with a substantial hand, very Chloé in its ’70s lines. The standout piece of tailoring was a navy coat with extra-large lapels and a swallowtail hem. Its back was ribbed knit, which gave it its snug fit without (presumably) making it constricting. That goes back to Lagerfeld’s comments about unstructured weightlessness.
On the accessories front, the talismanic jewelry weighed down more of the looks than necessary—a little would’ve gone a longer way—and the metal-hardware logos on the bags could be considerably more discreet. But otherwise, Ramsay-Levi has found a nice groove to work here.
