ShareDesigner Chemena Kamali -- who dressed Kamala Harris for the Democratic Convention in August -- turned heads at Paris Fashion Week with a line of lacy transparent looks the US presidential hopeful may be a little more shy about trying.
The German creator has quickly made her mark at French label Chloe, with pieces from her debut collection in February selling like hotcakes. Harris wore a prune-brown Chloe trouser suit for the opening night of the Democratic convention in Chicago where she took over from Joe Biden as the party’s presidential candidate, having already sported a high-necked green caped gown specially designed by Kamali in May.
For her spring-summer Chloe collection, Kamali threw open the windows to celebrate the brand’s highly feminine hippy-chic aesthetic with billowing dresses, lace and sun-bleached flower prints. An admiring “Ahhh!” ran along the front row when her lace corsair pants, tied delicately at the ankle, appeared.
All was light and airy, so light that at times it looked like her Chloe woman was going out in nothing more than lacy lingerie, an impression Kamali fully acknowledged in her notes. “A feeling of lingerie drifts through the collection,” she wrote, “and a sense of the playful in the iconic 70s Chloe bloomers.”
“The mood is light, sensual and joyful,” she added. There were, however, plenty of more conservative pieces that Harris might easily dream of wearing, particularly as it seemed to tap into the breezy 1970s glamour of her home state of California. Kamali began her career at Chloe under the influential Phoebe Philo before moving on to work with Anthony Vaccarello at Saint Laurent, who also has a thing for see-through blouses.
“I wanted to capture that longing for summer and the way summer makes you feel... that fantasy moment of the summer months when you reconnect with yourself,” said the 42-year-old, who trained at London’s Central Saint Martins art school.
Owens’s ageless American gothic
All this talk of summer was happening while Paris was being washed away by a day-long deluge. But the clouds suddenly cleared as if by miracle for the dark angels of Rick Owens, the cult Californian designer with his own post-apocalyptic groove of American gothic.
You may not know his name, but Owens is something of a style giant with an unmistakable look and ideas -- particularly on shoes, bags and shoulders -- that often break through to the street or into the shop windows of bigger, richer brands.
This time Owens marched 200 mostly amateur models -- his fans, friends and fashion students -- around the ravaged architectural grandeur of the Palais de Tokyo’s marble garden, while gloomy valkyries dropped white petals from the roof of the French capital’s “anti-museum”.
This being his spring-summer collection, the color palette went from black to blacker -- the great Chicano maverick never being one to make concessions to convention. — AFP
