If You Like French Girl Style You’ll Love Chloé’s New Collection From Natasha Ramsay-Levi
Natasha Ramsay-Levi's Paris Fashion Week debut at Chloé is even better than we thought it would be.
Chloé is a blessed brand. And judging from Natasha Ramsay-Levi’s debut as creative director of the storied French brand, those fortunes are not about to change. It’s a rare house in that it is known for being unabashedly cool, and pretty, and feminine. Three things that don’t automatically translate into huge profile and huge praise. The brand has a quiet star-power but it’s never basic, and continues to yield great returns at the till.
Richemont, the group owner, might not release individual brand results, but in a recent New York Times profile, one luxury market observer estimated Chloé sales to have been around $535 million USD last year. And in the past two decades, Chloé has been helmed by two of the most talked about female designers of our time: Stella McCartney and Pheobe Philo. When most recent creative director Clare Waight-Keller (English like McCartney and Philo) left the brand (she’s now at Givenchy) at the end of 2016 she left things in good shape thanks to the Faye and Drew bags.
The #chloegirls hash tag has over 70,000 posts and is synonymous with high-end bohemia, and I’m not talking about festival fashion. So with Ramsay-Levi at the helm, the brand now has its first French woman designer since 1988, and the interest in this hire has been intense. Ramsay-Levi, who worked closely with Nicolas Ghesquière at Louis Vuitton and Balenciaga, is the epitome of French girl cool: there is no blow-out, the eyebrows are full, and she wore jeans for her end of show walk. She is a young, single mother with a high profile ex, who knows (or used to know) her way around Parisian nightlife. Sounds like a lot of women we know, right?
For her Chloé debut this week, we saw (already!) incredible accessories like pointed, cowboy boots in short and high lengths, which are best worn with mid- or short- skirts as well as chunky necklaces, like the type you might have picked up at a flea market or found on a two-week trip to Morocco. Handbags revealed folkloric patterns, while chainlink straps were styled tightly around the models’ wrists, waiting to be swung in the air like a weapon when that street fight breaks out. You’ve been warned.
Our favourite looks from the Chloé Spring 2018 collection at Paris Fashion Week.