The Return of Flou
The resurgence of boho-chic from its aughts heyday—seen most notably at Chloé—has personality, practicality, and roots in 1970s fashion.
The Chloé Girl is back, baby. At her Fall 2024 debut during Paris Fashion Week in February, Chloé’s new Creative Director Chemena Kamali laid down the gauntlet in her show notes. “I want to feel her presence again; her beat, her natural beauty, her sense of freedom and undone-ness.” Sienna Miller, an aughts and early-teens avatar of boho-chic, sat front row in Kamali’s lace-trimmed silk crêpe de chine slip dress and towering wedge sandals. And it was a homecoming of sorts for Kamali herself: She was first an intern and then a design assistant under Phoebe Philo, and later, design director under Clare Waight Keller, before becoming womenswear design director under Anthony Vaccarello at Saint Laurent.
But if you thought this would be a redux of the recent fashion past à la the Gen Z obsession with all things Y2K, Miller’s presence turned out to be something of a red herring. The first clues were the actor’s seatmates: Pat Cleveland and Jerry Hall, two top models of the 1970s Paris runways who embodied the decade’s glamorous nonchalance. Then, of course, there were the clothes. Miles of diaphanous silk georgette, silk mousseline, and silk lace flowing across ruffled blouses, tunics, maxi dresses, and culottes in a range of soft pastels, including Chloé’s signature pinkish beige hue. They picked up vintage threads Philo and Waight Keller had sometimes explored in their collections. Hemlines were tucked into swashbuckling thigh-high boots, lending a finesse to the looks that read more Le Sept—the legendary ‘70s club where Parisiennes once went to live out their fashion fantasies—than it did a Coachella VIP area.
“This collection goes back to the late-‘70s era of the house that I feel so connected to,” says Kamali of her interest in unpacking the very origins of bourgeois-bohème style codes. “A time that was about a natural femininity. Sensual, effortlessly powerful, and free.” Kamali employs the term house, but she might just as easily have said houses: in the ‘70s, both Chloé (then led by Karl Lagerfeld, who became the maison’s first named creative director in 1974, having worked on the design team since 1964) and Yves Saint Laurent were in fierce competition to define the more relaxed Left Bank look of still-nascent French prêt-à-porter. Chloé had staged the first-ever ready-to-wear fashion show at Café de Flore in 1957, and Yves Saint Laurent had become the first couture house to launch a ready-to-wear line with the opening of the Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche boutique on Rue de Tournon in 1966. “I see Yves Saint Laurent a lot in the capes,” says curator Claudia Gould, referring to Kamali’s dramatic cotton gabardine and cashmere outerwear. Gould organized an exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum last fall on Chloé’s pioneering founder Gaby Aghion.
While today the house of Saint Laurent is best known for its grain de poudre precision tailoring, in the ‘70s, both maisons did lots of flou pieces in lightweight, sheer fabrics without linings or seams. Many of the ideas in celebrated Yves Saint Laurent haute couture collections—such as the Fall 1976 Ballets Russes and Spring 1977 Carmen collections—first emerged in Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche shows in the earlier part of the decade. Lagerfeld and Saint Laurent’s new, liberated silhouettes were in part inspired by the eclectic style of friends and colleagues like Loulou de la Falaise, who designed accessories for Yves Saint Laurent, and jewelry designer Paloma Picasso, a fan of vintage and a close confidant of both men. The two designers were brilliant at synthesizing disparate references: art movements from Art Deco (Lagerfeld) to Art Nouveau (Saint Laurent); flowy national costumes of Morocco, Russia, Spain, and China; and youth dress at the May 1968 student protests in Paris and Woodstock all served as fertile grist for designer’s mill.
This past summer, Halston fashion director Cameron Silver was on a book tour promoting his new tome, Caftans: From Classical to Camp, that took him from Mykonos to Nantucket and the Hamptons, and recruited new acolytes to what he terms the “Caftan Caucus,” referring to women who appreciate the opposite of body-con dressing. Gabriella Khalil, Creative Director of both the Cayman Islands resort Palm Heights and the Financial District members club WSA, has been collecting caftans for years from labels including Marrakshi Life, Matteau, Pippa Holt, and Taller Marmo. “They can easily translate to a city look, with closed flats or even a great pair of sneakers,” Khalil says. And it’s not just a summer look, argues Carla Sersale, co-owner of the Positano hotel Le Sirenuse and founder of the resortwear label Emporio Sirenuse. “Now that it’s fashionable to wear sandals inside even in winter, I don’t see why you shouldn't be able to wear a lovely silk caftan during Christmastime in St. Moritz,” Sersale says.
Net-a-Porter was the first retailer to launch Kamali’s Chloé collection. The e-tailer’s Market Director, Libby Page, believes that customer demand for feminine, romantic pieces never really disappeared, even if they all but vanished from the runways of major luxury brands in recent seasons. “Relaxed boho that feels feminine and cool has always resonated with our customers, but they have been lacking the resources,” Page says. “Chemena has breathed new life into this mood; it feels fresh and in line with how women want to dress and feel right now, and we’ve all been craving it!” She notes that a handful of smaller independent labels like Ulla Johnson, Isabel Marant, Alix of Bohemia, Bode, and Maison Mayle stepped in to plug the boho hole, but there’s a great appetite for even more elegant, unconstricted fashion. “The new Chloé collection has a very feminine, sensual, and fluid joie de vivre,” says Gould. “To borrow a line from Karl Lagerfeld, it’s the ‘mood of the moment.’”
