Chloé’s Spring 2026 collection, Female Vertigo, explores the aesthetic and ideological split between two distinct portrayals of femininity in early 1980s cinema and photography. At its core, the collection examines the contrasting ways women have been framed through the male and female gaze, pulling tension from that divide to inform its silhouettes, palette, and styling.
Drawing from the heightened stylization of 1980s film noir thrillers, particularly those of Brian De Palma, the collection borrows the coded glamour, obsessive tone, and bold angular compositions associated with the male lens. Hitchcockian influence filters through the collection’s assertive tailoring and sculptural volume, clothes designed to project command and allure in equal measure. The fabrics are light but purposeful, holding shape even in movement, while the colors are unapologetically vivid, with prints that nod to the visual drama of the big screen.
Running counter to this cinematic fantasy is a quieter thread, informed by the work of photographer Sybille Mallmann and filmmaker Bette Gordon. Mallmann’s candid images of young women in West Berlin and Munich offered a more grounded, textured portrait of femininity, one that spoke to interiority, individuality, and the politics of daily life. Gordon’s 1983 film Variety, often referred to as the “Feminist Vertigo,” is a key touchpoint for this part of the collection’s narrative. Her protagonist, the subject of her own story, resists the objectifying gaze and reframes desire on her own terms.
This dichotomy, between high-gloss projection and unfiltered authenticity, is where Female Vertigo lives. It manifests in the collection’s dual approach: bold yet nuanced, sensual yet grounded. The garments move between structured blazers with cinched waists to fluid dresses that trace the body without exaggeration. The Chloé woman, in this season’s vision, shifts between modes. She is both archetype and disruptor, an image and a presence.
Photographed by Johnny Dufort, the campaign stars actress Lily McInerny alongside a cast of emerging talents including Prinnie Stott, Stella Hanan, Jacqui Hooper, Heija Li, Marylore Heck, River Klein, Carolina Tilgner, and Ekaterina Riabenko. Each portrait suggests a different angle of the same story, multiplicity rather than resolution, a refusal to flatten womanhood into a single frame.
With Female Vertigo, Chloé asserts a cinematic wardrobe that moves beyond nostalgia. It borrows visual codes from the past to question them, not to replicate them. The collection will arrive in Chloé boutiques and online in November 2025, inviting wearers to step into a narrative that is at once constructed and undone.
