Martine Sitbon

Martine Sitbon is a Moroccan-born French designer, born in Casablanca in 1951, whose work entered the history of Chloé through a sharper and more rock-inflected femininity. She belongs to a generation of Paris fashion shaped by both romantic dress and a willingness to roughen elegance at the edges.

In brand terms, Sitbon matters because she brought tension into softness. The row links her not to a decorative reading of femininity alone, but to one with attitude, edge and a certain nocturnal charge, which helped keep Chloé from settling into a single predictable mode.

Sitbon’s work brings femininity into contact with abrasion. The supportable cues here are rock-and-roll attitude and softness held under pressure, so that dresses and silhouettes do not read as merely pretty or passive.

That tension is important to the effect. Romantic elements can remain in view, but they are sharpened by mood, line or styling, which gives the clothes a more elusive and modern finish. This produces neither strict minimalism nor pure ornament, but a feminine language with friction built into it. It is that friction, more than any single motif, that gives her work its lasting recognisability.