paddington laid bare; Chloe bags a new creative director from Marni.

Byline: Sally Singer

Could there be harder, more round-toed and girlish shoes to fill than those vacated by Phoebe Philo and, before her, Stella McCartney at Chloe? Both Philo and McCartney had the knack, in addition to designing terrifically cool and irreverent clothes, of making women desperate to look just like them. Baggy-ass trousers? If Phoebe was wearing them, so too gals from Austin to Osaka. It is unlikely that Paulo Melim Andersson will have a similar effect. Appointed after a yearlong search that had the fashion world turning red from holding its breath, Chloe's new design director is a 34-year-old Swede who has a taste for avant-garde designers (Junya Watanabe, Carol Christian Poell, Christopher Nemeth, and Martin Margiela) and a dry, deadpan expression. When asked to describe the color of a short Swakara coat from his first set of offerings for the house, he says, "Depressed pistachio." The saffron of a pretty bow-neck blouse? "BBC Regency-drama lipstick." What we have, in essence, is a shrewd, clever boy-instead of an alpha girl-running the house of Chloe. This is not without precedent. The shrewdest, cleverest boy of them all, Karl Lagerfeld, led the brand from 1965 until 1983, and in doing so defined city-wise, lighthearted bohemianism for two decades. (Lagerfeld returned in 1992-after a stint at the helm by Martine Sitbon-and remained until McCartney's hiring in 1997.) Andersson's challenge is to maintain Chloe's dominance of the dirty-pretty-thing market without the benefit of personal iconicity. His clothes and, almost more important, his bags will have to do the trick. Luckily, the designer has spent the last seven and a half years dreaming up looks for Marni, the Italian dirty-pretty-thing _powerhouse. There he worked closely with Consuelo Castiglioni on every aspect of the collection: the dresses, bags, shoes, and jewelry. When Andersson says, "I want to do something that is not sentimental, something you can have a life in," it's because he was ...