Since last season, everyone here at Vogue has been on boho-watch. It was José Criales-Unzueta who first had an inkling that the return of this aughts trend was upon us after studying the baubles that appeared on the spring 2024 runways. “There’s something to be said for jewelry that looks and feels grounded. It’s about finding a balance—aesthetically and metaphysically,” he wrote.
Chemena Kamali’s debut collection at Chloé certainly fit the brief with its gauzy ruffled dresses tucked into boots and accessorized with hip-slung gold belts. It sealed the deal—boho is back! But it was the sight of Kamali herself, in a silky caramel-colored button-down, obviously vintage mid-rise flared jeans, and retro-sneakers (with velcro!) that made the trend fully irresistible. There was a sense that we as spectators wanted to both wear the clothes on the runway and maybe also channel some of the designer’s own easy-going, carefree attitude. (As she came out to take her bow and her child ran up towards her, Kamali scooped them up, hugged them, deposited them on the lap of a family member, and continued her runway lap without missing a beat—a woman having it all!)
In an interview published before her Chloé debut, Kamali mentioned that she collects vintage blouses—she has “600 or 700,” and they are “organized by color,” starting “with white and off-white and then going into beiges and blush tones.” “If there’s one thing that’s very Chloé, it’s the blouse,” she told my colleague Mark Holgate.
The blouse. It’s an item that has fallen out of favor. We buy button-downs, T-shirts, and turtlenecks instead. Some women with proper office jobs still wear a blouse as part of their professional dress code, but otherwise it has lost its status as a desirable object. The Chloé show changed that. The white ruffled lace blouse (tucked into two-tone jeans and worn with wooden clogs) Kamali sent dow the runway seems poised to become one of the low-key must-haves of the season, but looking to get a jump on the trend, I decided to follow the designer’s own example and hit up the vintage stores instead.
Earlier this month at the A Current Affair vintage show in Brooklyn, which gathered more than 60 vintage vendors from all over the country, the boho influence was beginning to take shape, but not in the way that I predicted. Although there were a handful of designer archive finds that fit the brief—I left behind a gorgeous vintage white-on-black polka dotted off-the-shoulder Yves Saint Laurent blouse, for example—it was antique pieces like little Victorian and Edwardian cotton and lace blouses and semi-sheer frilly slips and gowns from the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s that felt like the essential things to add to my wardrobe right now.
“When I began selling vintage four years ago, everything I had was from the ’30s and ’40s, or like Edwardian blouses and lawn dresses,” Michael Phillips of Toots Vintage told me. “From there it evolved into this Y2K sort of resurgence, and now I do feel like this more relaxed thing is happening, and I’m bringing back some of the Edwardian stuff that I used to do. I look at the Chloé collection with those tiered ruffles and I’m like, ‘Okay how can we get that?’” The diaphanous silk and satin dresses in every color of the rainbow (some hand-dyed) that lined his racks were less frilly than the French label’s runway offerings, but the carefree vibe was more or less the same.
Rachel Cubra, who runs Here Studio California, has also clocked the slow-but-steady rise of boho fashion. “I’ve sensed that it’s back in the way I see people dress; but I live in California so it’s a little bit different than in New York,” she explained. “I’ve always sold blouses and gauzy pieces; but whereas before there was a big jeans-with-a-gauzy blouse moment, now I see women wearing ethereal dresses and going full-femme with it.”
For Jeanna Johnson, who has run SwaneeGRACE since 2006, her shop is a reflection of her personal taste—which just so happens to lean very boho. “I used to work at Bergdorf Goodman and I would hear ‘Is that Chloé?’ a lot,” she recalled. “In my vintage world, [boho] never left.” At A Current Affair, Johnson had one rack full of dresses and blouses in shades of antique white and beige in all manners of textures and finishes—sumptuous jacquards, corded embroidery, lace. It was boho paradise. “I had a handful of really beautiful silk and lace blouses from the 1970s and every piece sold,” she pointed out. “In my experience, all those gorgeous [pieces] from that era have never stopped being coveted, so the really good ones have become way harder to find.” Challenge accepted.
