The year is 2004, and Sienna Miller is stomping the streets of Notting Hill in slouchy boots and a frilly white dress—it could be circa 1960 vintage, or something from Phoebe Philo’s spring 2004 collection for Chloé. A hundred or so miles to the west, Kate Moss is backstage at Glastonbury in tiny shorts, a waistcoat, and a studded vintage belt—a cool and loose style soon described as “new bohemian.” (Miller, in her Roberto Cavalli handkerchief dresses, Ossie Clark tops, and coin belts, co-headlines this bill.) Stateside, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are running around Manhattan wearing sandals and ruffled dresses under T-shirts and hoodies; on the West Coast, Jessica Alba walks the red carpet in a chiffon dress over jeans, with Kate Hudson captured by paparazzi in a breezy white iteration, a fringed suede handbag on her shoulder.
Kate Moss at Glastonbury in 2005.
Boho chic, as this phenomenon came to be known, is a lot of things: It’s an undone, laid-back kind of cool, and while some would argue that it’s never exactly gone away (female-helmed labels from Isabel Marant and Ulla Johnson to Zimmermann have been riffing on this vibe for years), two decades after Sienna and Kate and all the rest, it’s back in full force, led by Chloé designer Chemena Kamali.
Kamali’s debut for the house at the fall collections in Paris in February seemed to articulate this nascent yearning for easier, lighter, free-spirited clothes. Kamali spent her formative years as a designer at Chloé—as an intern under Philo and then as a designer for Clare Waight Keller—and her ’70s flouncy hems, shirred necklines, snake necklaces, and wooden clogs (worn by Miller, Liya Kebede, Kiernan Shipka, Georgia May Jagger, Pat Cleveland, and more in the front row) hearkened back to the Chloé that helped define the look of the 2000s.
If the original boho resurgence was fueled by Miller’s vintage- and Ossie Clark–filled wardrobe, the Olsen twins’ grungier, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink twist on the trend—dubbed bobo chic (after the French bourgeois bohème; the closest English term might be Champagne socialist) when its long-strand necklaces, toe rings, and maxi skirts ruled lower Manhattan in the aughts—was all over the fall 2024 runways. Why now?
Sienna Miller at Glastonbury in 2022.
“I don’t know that I was conscious of this at 21,” Miller said, “but this softness and femininity has historically appeared in moments of political stress and war—for something to take off in the way this did, it has to be hitting the zeitgeist in some way.”
If the early 2000s saw 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the war in Iraq, today brings wars in Ukraine and Gaza, civil war and humanitarian crises in Sudan and elsewhere, and a crucial election looming in the US. There’s been no shortage of things to react against, whether then or now.
“That style of dressing reminded me of a time in the past that I felt inspired by and connected to,” said Miller. Think 1967’s Summer of Love in San Francisco, or the hippie and anti-war social movements that came to define a generation of thought and style.