The Chloé Girl Goes Club Rat

The general consensus — both in our team meetings and in the comments section of various TikToks — is that Coachella fashion regressed this year. There were a few highlights, to be sure, like the belt boom (more on that soon) and Lorde’s devil-may-care Dickies. The true win of the weekend, though, was the fashion-forward way our favorite pop princesses and cultural phenoms made the Chloé-girl trend their own with rave-approved accessories and the imperfect, sweaty-club energy they brought to the bohemian aesthetic. This year, the Chloé woman goes from Chez Margaux to Papi Juice.

The most shining example of a girlie making it work for their own personal style is Charli XCX, who wore a vintage Yves Saint Laurent blouse by Tom Ford complete with boob-crossing straps and billowing pirate sleeves. To counteract the flou of the top, her stylist Chris Horan juxtaposed it with a chain belt, a fashion-girl-favorite boot from Fidan Novruzova, and rocker sunnies from Jacques Marie Mage. It was punk, pop, rock, and boho all at the same time.

A month before ‘Chella, Alex Consani was already making the hard-soft combo a thing at Paris Fashion Week, where she balanced out a lacy peach Chloé dress with sturdy boots. She additionally wore two nude dresses to the festival over the weekend, which she also made her own with buggy black sunnies and mid-2010s fashion jewelry seemingly plucked from Urban Outfitters. Addison Rae also wore Chloé (hers fresh off the runway) and paired it with a custom Pink bikini brief, which cheekily had her album release date printed on the back if you looked close enough under the lights of Arca’s set. It was the perfect dose of Y2Chaos to offset the otherwise Keira-Knightley-in-Pride-and-Prejudice-leaning maxi dress.

While many festival-goers felt stuck in 2012 with fashion that relied too much on Pinterest boards and not enough on personal instinct, the girls who brought Chloé and clubbing together did it with singularity. They mixed so many references and disparate aesthetics as one that it came out the other end looking different than anything else we saw all weekend long. The right way to go about it is putting two or three things together that (on paper) don’t match, but will transcend the scantily clad masses and make a bigger statement than a corset top and denim shorts.