This Collection Makes Me Miss My Going-Out Clothes
Girls just want to have fun—and Stella McCartney for Chloé spring 1999 did it best.
This week, Vogue Runway posted several shows from 1999 for a Y2K package, a project headed up by Vogue Runway Director Nicole Phelps and the magazine’s legendary archivist Laird Borrelli-Persson. There was Chanel, Galliano, and two from Stella McCartney-era Chloé. Though, the show that annihilated me was the Chloé spring 1999 collection. I’m biased: I own a few pieces from the collection, including the hummingbird shirt I scooped from James Veloria’s Chloé sale a few years back and a tropical tank top I’ve meant to hand off to someone. I also have the zodiac shirts. I bought these before the price gouge-boom of archival Chloé—and make no mistake, it’s all essentially gone. One remnant of the collection I can find is the glorious airbrushed eagle bust shirt on Depop that is listed for $600. (I mentioned this in Phelps’s VR newsletter this week.) The last eagle shirt I saw sold for $295 from Arcade Shop!
I felt an emotional twang when I saw the show hit the website. My year of ’99 was spent inhaling frozen food dinners and chugging a liter of Diet Coke in my hometown, far from London, where then-creative director McCartney was raucously frolicking around with her deep-pocketed, gorgeous friends. Whether I was there or not, the clothes touch me at my core. Stella-era Chloé garments are the wild-eyed moment that happens right as girlhood veers into womanhood. There’s the sliver of midriff, fuck-all airbrushed souvenir T-shirts, and jeans that sit a bit too low. The body-skimming silk dresses; the lace-embroidered slips. As my former colleague wrote to me: “It’s undone and lived-in, not just tight and bright.” Whether you own the garb or not, the clothes of Chloé spring 1999 arrive at blink-and-you-miss-it moments. Just as you think life can go on forever, that we are immortal, the fun is eternal—and there is still room to be a bit cunty. Fun fact: For the spring 1999 show, McCartney played former President Bill Clinton’s “I didn’t have sexual relations” testimony, aka the Monicagate sermon on the runway. How bratty can you be? How flagrantly risk-taking can you get? This is that fleeting, gorgeous moment.
The dropdown slideshow on Vogue Runway ends with a baby-faced Stella McCartney, only 28 years old. She’s beaming with gorgeous red cheeks and her dad’s perpetual bedroom eyes. The short straps of her milkmaid white blouse are undone and fall down in front of her brutally tailored blazer. We are seeing unbridled youth and the ethos of a professional woman duel it out in one look.
The best of unbridled youth on the Chloé runway is seen in the epic going-out tops. Embroidered. Flouncy. Floss-thin things. A braless model wears a semi-sheer top, and her breasts are free-falling. Another model, in a sheer dress, has her rack on full-force display. In the July issue of 2000 Vogue, Jonathan van Meter profiled McCartney and quoted her friend: “‘She’s always slightly popping out of her camisole.’” The cleavage thunk is a take-me-as-I-am attitude, which I’ve always found to be a powerful delivery.
Look #68 truly stuck with me and drives that I-am-who-I-am point home the most. It’s not necessarily that I love the creamy white tank top embroidered with curvy, erotic petals, but rather, I adore how the strap has fallen down the shoulder. Was the top styled like this? Did the strap simply fall from the shoulder as the model was walking? I bet that it just happened. Either way, I could imagine this very top out in the buxom flesh. I wrote to my group chat: “I am empowered by this louchely fallen strap—and nothing else.” This is the sort of woman who has the world at her tank straps—even if they are sometimes falling down!
I wrote about the appeal of Stella-era Chloé in 2021 just as Bella Hadid was snapping up her pieces, but I didn’t quite understand why the collection hit such a nerve for me. Perhaps it is because I’ve always had trouble understanding current runway clothes and how to actually live in them in the real world; my world. Yet, the Stella for Chloé designs feel real, and even on the runway, there’s a soulful, confident, fuck-all context.
Perhaps this is because McCartney was designing for her girlfriends. Read any article from that era, and the designer herself or the journalist will allude to this. “Ms. McCartney's real strength is mixing separates, like a heathery tweed bustier over a cream off-the-shoulder sweater, the way her London girlfriends might,” Cathy Horyn wrote for The New York Times back in 1999. Sure, McCartney had the generational loot and the confidence that comes with a particular upbringing to design for her girlfriends for a Richemont Group-backed house. But I’m thankful for that! It’s refreshing to see unserious clothes that are, in fact, rendered very seriously. The quality of the collection is killer.
There is a gap in non-full look, easy-going-out clothes like Stella’s Chloé on the runway. However, all is not lost, and a few current designers fall into this flouncy realm, like Conner Ives, who models his clothes from fab characters and scenarios (see: his fashion editor look!) and can freak a baby tee by percolating it with subversive ruffles. Tank Air isn’t necessarily runway, but I can’t get over the light sauciness of the curve-skimming pieces—and it's evident that designer Claire Robertson-Macleod knows her girls as she chops up a killer tank.
Regardless, I’ll wear my Stella-era Chloé hummingbird shirt at the bar—and maybe we can share a cigarette there, too.
what Miuccia did for the pleated skirt, Stella did for the silk camisole - I was never a 'jeans and a nice top' girl but oof was I obsessed with a pretty camisole in the 00s....tank tops and spaghetti strap camisoles were a 90s thing but I preferred her louchely sensual, outdoor-lingerie take on them at Chloé (or, well, the version I could afford on the high street) to the more minimal versions that prevailed before that. And based on the pics here, here's actually a case to be made that Stella was the one to kickstart the evolution of the camisole into what it became in the 00s (less sporty and minimal, more opulent and decorative). Chloé-wise I've always been more into Phoebe's work, but Stella was undeniably the one who made the label relevant again.
I went to Wildwood NJ after senior prom in 1999 and brought the runway shot to a boardwalk airbrush stall as a reference