“Psychedelic optimism,” Clare Waight Keller offered backstage before the final show of her impressive six-year tenure at Chloé. Her goal: to provide a sense of escapism through fashion. “It’s not political, but it’s where people go when they feel a lot of what’s going on in the culture now,” she said. “They look for escapism.” Waight Keller looked relaxed and happy as she spoke, not at all overwhelmed by her valedictory moment. She said she is “thrilled to have been at Chloé for six years,” and, about the future, is “feeling really optimistic.”
Whether a source of that optimism is a new job at Givenchy, as rumors suggest, remains to be seen. But it was difficult to look at her collection without considering what she might do there. Despite her stated psychedelic theme, grounded in part from watching “Yellow Submarine,” the collection featured neither intense visual mania nor cartoon overstatement. Waight Keller’s take on escapism is pragmatic and pristine, rendered via patterns — prints of opium poppies and a Wonderland mushroom motif, both of which looked pretty, if too delicate to telegraph their connection to the theme on the runway. Another print, a face in profile against the night sky, proved more obvious,
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