Whack the hippy gong-boho's back

It happened in Paris one grey February day. Sienna Miller was in an oversized, black leather jacket, lace-trimmed silk slip and clumpy great wedges.

- JOE BROMLEY

Around her, women wore crochet skirts, some held capacious and worn leather sack bags while plenty were bundled in beige suede. No, this wasn’t February 2005 but earlier this year, when the boho-chic army held a reunion outside the Chloé show.

Inside, its incoming creative director Chemena Kamali whacked the hippy gong. To the backing of Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting, her debut collection was a wave of Seventies-tinged, floating and frilled chiffon dresses in icy blues and every iteration of brown. They were paired with clanging gold pendants, cashmere capes, overthe-knee leather boots, swathes of white lace and Jane Birkin flared jeans.

It flew. Trend forecaster WGSN found “Kamali’s debut for Chloé is what cemented the commercial return of boho”. It succeeded in setting off a chain (belt) reaction which has seen Miller, Kate Moss and the Olsen twins’ go-to Noughties look (as pinched from pin-ups Anita Pallenberg, Stevie Nicks et al) resuscitated from its festival dress-up box coffin — and re-packaged as this season’s most impactful trend.

Miller herself leant in over the summer, re-hashing some of Kamali’s Chloé looks she flaunted during her Horizon: An American Saga press tour for a Haight-Ashbury-adjacent M&S collaboration in June. “I think everyone looks great in it,” she told the press at the time. “This [new] take on boho is kind of what was naff back then. Some of the Nineties, early 2000s designer co-ords and little glasses. I think people look beautiful in floaty things, I really do.”