Paris Fashion Week: Chloe spring/summer 2012

Chloe's new creative director Clare Waight Keller - formerly of Pringle - was parachuted into Paris only a few months ago. Backstage just before her debut collection today, she said: "It's all been very fast, but it's been exciting. It's great to be in a French house, because you have the opportunity to work with an atelier. I just moved here, but already am feeling the energy of the city, and that has really influenced me."

Chloe is a unique house, synonymous with both luxury (as they all are) but with a casual, laid-back femininity too. The archetypal Chloe girl is a thick-coiffed, well-off twenty-something Parisienne bounding down the boulevards in chic, sleek, sexy ready-to-wear - probably in camel or beige.

Unfortunately Waight Keller's first collection did not fully connect with this spirit. The short explanation is that it was over-replete with pleats. It started well enough, with a couple of wide, long white contrast-coloured pleat dresses - a low-backed green pleat on white dress with dental-floss thin shoulder straps was casually lovely - and baggy, pleated-shoulder tops teamed with slouchy trousers. Pleat fatigue started to kick in with a green, thick-pleated skirt that looked to be a contrast-textured leather. Its odd movement made the model's backside look enormous - not a look that the Chloe girl aspires to.

Then came a series of drop-waisted pleat skirts, often with panels of rust, brown, or beige running horizontally across the pleats or vertically with them. They were unflattering too. Pleat pique was rapidly peaking, and thankfully Waight Keller started to introduce some other ideas, including widely punched-hole details on arms and old-lady floral prints (sweet) on trousers. Unfortunately they were rarely entirely pleat-free. And these pleats were not the delicate little zig-zags that crinkled so sensitively to movement like those used at Etro in Milan, or Erdem in London earlier this season: they were three-inch-ish wide numbers that gullumphed as they moved like the slatted leather skirt of a Roman legionnaire.

One skirt, just before the end, was a longish brown leather with red and white piping - an adaptation of the little 1970's-style racing-hemmed shorts that have been everywhere for the last few weeks, and were clever. Yet if Waight Keller had presented a variation of this theme - as she did with her pleats - over and over again, it would have stalled too.

There was little applause at the end. Yet Chloe should give Waight Keller, who is smart, more time to interpret around Chloe girl. She might eventually come up trumps. Although, like a Brutalist architect, she is perhaps sometimes too enchanted with articulating the ideas behind her work at the expense of the desires of those who might inhabit it. And one of those desires will always be to not have a big behind.