After last season s vision of a hard-stomping girl on the Chloé runway, a slightly different spirit blew in for Spring. She made one of the season s more offbeat counterpoints to the pretty chiffon drift of fashion—it was romantic and layered, but with the retro-cuteness cauterized by an intrinsic graphic modernity. Paulo Melim Andersson s close-to-the-body, drop-waisted, flyaway patchworked dresses, which ran throughout his show, were partly abstracted, he said, from the idea of wind and sails (he s a keen sailor in his spare time.)
There was something fresh in the collection, which featured a lot of painterly prints that echoed Melim Andersson s previous tenure at Marni, as well as a few rare thoughts about how to make transparency passable on a daily basis. As diaphanous as the asymmetrically tucked dresses and tiny wrapped skirts may be at first sight, each one came with some kind of under- or over-piece to ameliorate exposure issues. The top pieces were long, sleeveless blazers (a Paris trend) or long-line knits, and the under-things were chiffon leggings or shorts.
If it wasn t perfect (there was a lot of repetition of that one combination of elements), by the end, there was certainly a clear image of what Chloé will be for summer. Better, there was also a sense in which this collection had reverted, in a contemporary way, to the old-time Chloé of the early seventies, when Karl Lagerfeld made it the go-to label for fashion-sensitive hippie girls. The fact that Melim Andersson managed to make this link, however tenuously, is a point in his favor. Though the memory of Phoebe Philo s recent successes at Chloé weighs heavily on his shoulders, this emerging young designer is right to start asserting a fresh point of view in his own way.
