For every creative director in a heritage house, there’s always the question of speaking one’s own truth, while respecting (or sometimes overthrowing) the codes laid down in the past. For Chemena Kamali, one of two women creative directors in Paris (Sarah Burton at Givenchy being her sole counterpart), that balance currently lies somewhere between her attraction to Karl Lagerfeld’s 1980s big-shouldered silhouettes for the house and her sense of who the Parisian Chloé girl is now.
“I love the aesthetics of the 1980s, mostly because it’s part of my earliest memories of fashion,” she said while explaining the influences she channeled into her resort collection. “I remember my mother wearing those strong, more accentuated shoulders, a nipped-in waist and a peplum. It’s what I grew up with, what I see in old family pictures.” Padded shoulders and mini pencil skirts were the surprise she fielded at the end of her last runway show—a move away from the floaty, neo-boho maxi dresses she’d captured in her first two shows. Since then, she said she’d been immersing herself in early ’80s movies—contrasting the Hollywood Brian de Palma blockbuster thriller Dressed to Kill with the female-gaze narrative of Variety, a movie that “turned the tables on men,” directed by the New York alternative director Bette Gordon around the same time.
“When I started rewatching the films, those memories came flooding back and inspired me. There was a sense of assertiveness in that era that felt very distinctive,” she said. “So I continued a little bit with that, taking all these sort of more cinematographic influences into account, and thinking about a more rounded shoulder, a smaller waist, a more narrow skirt.”
The proportions of her tailoring happen to chime with the padded-shoulder silhouettes that Anthony Vaccarello at Saint Laurent has been working on for women and men. The difference for Chloé is that Kamali has fused tiny flippy georgette dresses, capri pants, and pink satin lace-trimmed lingerie slips into the picture. Is that an indication of where she’ll be going with her next runway show? Kamali replied with a noncommittal smile. Maybe yes, maybe no.
