The more I look with the purses from Chloe autumn 2011, the more I question who the Chloe woman is. I likewise question if Chloe’s accessories designers understand the response to that question, or if they’ve selected instead to hope that they can make everybody feel like a Chloe woman by producing a collection that eschews a unifying aesthetic in favor of encompassing a group of concepts that are seemingly not related.
If you like hard-lined, ladylike purses in exotic materials (or bags with actual animal heads), Chloe has a bag for you. If you spent all of your youth lusting after your mom’s coach container bags, well, there are lots of styles that look like those as well. Are you a hippie who likes colorblocking as well as whipstitching? You’re not left out, either. Of course, bags aren’t offered as a collection; they’re offered as private pieces to private women who most likely don’t care what the rest of the bags in the collection look like as long as they like the pieces that they’re buying. Still, though, I can’t shake the perception that this is a collection without an identity, as well as I’m not sure exactly how you go about advertising that.
Photos via Vogue.com.