Chloé Finds a New Formula (and the Fun!) Under Creative Director Chemena Kamali
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The excitement was palpable today at the Chloé show in Paris. The fall 2024 collection shown today was the first under the house’s new creative director Chemena Kamali, who previously worked at Chloé under Phoebe Philo and Clare Waight Keller before moving on to join Anthony Vaccarello at Saint Laurent. Kamali’s appointment is particularly newsworthy not only because she once worked behind the scenes at Chloé, but also because she is the only woman who has been appointed to the creative head of a luxury fashion house in recent years.
“It’s a homecoming,” Mikhaela Aghion, granddaughter of the house’s founder Gaby Aghion, told me just ahead of show time in front of our blush-colored curved bench seats. I’d spoken to Aghion back in October just ahead of the opening of an exhibition celebrating her grandmother’s legacy at the Jewish Museum in New York and shortly after the announcement that Kamali would be rejoining Chloé. “There’s a lot of pressure in the atelier,” she admitted, but was quick to emphasize that “there’s a lot of joy too.”
That joy was realized as soon as the first look hit the runway: a ruffled ivory mini dress with elongated sleeves that fluttered beneath a cropped black poncho, worn with square-toe flats, aviator shades, and a gold charm statement necklace. It was clear from the outset that the energy level turned up, from the playful nods to the archives (banana-handle bags, clever blouses, belts with the Chloe logo script across the front) to the updated classics like patchwork jeans and ethereal transparent caftan-shaped dresses.
The hems of some dresses were tucked into the front of one thigh-high boot, which was a chic, fluid-feeling styling trick Kamali recently discovered in her deep dives into the archive.
Backstage after the show, Kamali said she looked to both Lagerfeld's time at the house as well as Aghion's progressive vision for the brand; both, she said, had the uncanny ability to “look into the past and the future simultaneously." She continued, "It’s a sense of nostalgia that takes something which triggers a memory and makes you feel something today. This is very much to me what Chloé is about.” Indeed, her vision for the house has an incredibly well-balanced feeling of greatest hits and clothes for now, things like the low-slung pants with fringe on the thigh and ballooned and pleated silk below the knee. The outerwear was fantastic too, with classic shapes like the trench and capes but reinvigorated through playful proportions. Accessories were designed with both form and function in mind, namely in the way Kamali brought back natural grain vegetal leathers that, as she noted “get better over time.” She also said her intention was to make something “not too precious, something you can put on the floor.”
Kamali understands how clothes and accessories must fit into a real woman's life. Kamali herself is the mother of a young child, as well as having a high-powered job; her own clothes must work for a corporate environment as well as playing on the floor. That balance is at the core of Chloé and it’s the foundation that Aghion set out to achieve with her brand. “She wanted to liberate women from the stiffness of couture,” Kamali said. “She wanted women to be able to be free, to move and go to work but still feel a sense of youthful spirit, of spontaneity.”
At the end of the show, the audience applauded loudly and Kamali’s young son jumped up and down in the front row, cheering as his mom came out to take her bow. It was lovely, emotional, and hopeful all at once. “It means so much to be here,” Kamali said. “It means so much to give [Chloé] a voice and revisit these emotions–I always said I would love to bring back the feeling I had when I fell in love with Chloé over twenty years ago...This is a collection that is intimately about intuition and female energy and I really would love for women to feel that because I feel it.”
Walking out of the venue, I ran into Aghion again who looked at me with a giant smile and said, “a homecoming.”
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