Chemena Kamali opens the door to her office at the Chloé headquarters on Avenue Percier in Paris, revealing a long, curved sofa, pink peonies in a vase and a silver tray laid with tea. On the wall is an orderly grid of images: swimsuits designed by Karl Lagerfeld during his time at the house; Mick Jagger; bra-strap tan lines; a cigarette balanced between pouting lips. Kamali, 42, dressed in high-waisted, wide-legged Chloé jeans and a latte-coloured blouse, welcomes me in.
She grins, a warm, Cheshire Cat-like smile. Kamali’s appointment as Chloé’s creative director in October of 2023 – she took over from Gabriela Hearst – did not surprise those who knew her and the brand. This will be Kamali’s third time working at the house, having started in her early 20s as an intern when Phoebe Philo was at the helm.
Though the ranks of creative directors in fashion may look very male at the moment, it wasn’t a shock that Chloé – the clothing label by and for women – hired a woman for the job. And while Kamali assures me that she is not the kind of leader who enjoys being front and centre, she also recognises that the outlook and ethos of the house dovetails nicely with her own style, which juxtaposes traditional femininity with carefree cool. “A lot of what I’m doing is from a really honest place,” she says, “just expressing the most honest form of femininity.
” It is resonating. Kamali’s first runway show, in February this year, was one of the most warmly received debuts in recent history. There were sheer lacy blouses and rippling layers, everything in soft and appealing fabrics, punctuated by pieces with backbone – power-dressing that was also undeniably feminine.
Her models strode down the runway – hands in pockets, loose waves bouncing – to “Cloudbusting” by Kate Bush. Kamali’s friend Deck D’Arcy from the band Phoenix had helped choose the music, along with Kamali’s husband, Konstantin Wehrum, who moonlights as a music consultant for Chloé. (A management consultant, he helped Pfizer-BioNTech with the rollout of its vaccine during the pandemic.
) For those in the audience, the energy was palpable, but there were viral moments as well, including a photo of front-row guests (Liya Kebede, Sienna Miller , Pat Cleveland, Kiernan Shipka), their legs crossed in parallel, all wearing the same Chloé wedge . The visual was lauded as genius marketing, a minting of the new It-shoe, though Kamali tells me it was entirely unplanned. The RealReal, perhaps the most immediate barometer of momentum, saw a 37 per cent spike in searches for Chloé the day after the show – and a 130 per cent jump in sales the following month.
What was it, exactly, that hit such a pleasing nerve? “Fashion’s been in a place that’s really experimental and avant garde,” says Miller, “but this felt like, ‘Thank God we can be that girl again.’” That Chloé girl – established earlier in the house’s history by designers including Stella McCartney and Philo – was a woman defined as much by her fun-loving, insouciant (but not insubstantial) attitude as her nonchalant, bohemian clothes. If you couldn’t be her, you wanted to be near her, or at least dress like her.
Creative directors sometimes feel the need to proclaim their politics in their debut – and the pressure can be more intense for female designers. (Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri sending models down the runway in 2016 in “We Should All Be Feminists” T-shirts – on the dark eve before the US election of Donald Trump – comes to mind.) And with another American election looming, there will of course be political messages aplenty this autumn.
Kamali has, in fact, already been intimately involved with that more subtle but no less powerful signalling, dressing the Democratic presidential candidate, vice president Kamala Harris , for two appearances at the her party’s National Convention in August, first in a cheekily named “coconut brown” suit (a reference to a viral speech she gave earlier this year, quoting her mother) and then in a navy outfit on the final night, when she officially accepted the nomination. These were tailored pieces without slogans or logos that nonetheless communicated a message of strength and determination. “For me, women who wear Chloé embody a powerful femininity and confidence,” Kamali says just after the convention.
“Chloé is not transformative – wearing Chloé is about feeling like yourself.” Kamali’s father, Tony, grew up in Iran and studied architecture in Germany, where he met Kamali’s mother, Monika, a free-spirited hairdresser from a small town. (Kamali was named after Doña Jimena, a character played by Sophia Loren in the 1961 film El Cid .
) “They were both very adventurous people,” Kamali says, “wanting their kids to see all different sides of the world.” The couple settled in Dortmund, near Düsseldorf, and later opened clothing boutiques. “She loved to watch customers trying things on,” says Monika.
“She was really interested in why people loved something or didn’t – and she had strong opinions about what she would change to make it better.” Kamali has a brother, Arian – now an artist living in Germany – and the four of them were a tight-knit unit. When Kamali was 11, her parents moved the family to Orange County, California.
With limited English, the Kamali kids were unmoored. (“My parents were like, ‘It’s just going to make them stronger,’” Kamali says.) The family settled in Laguna Beach, where her parents opened another shop, and Kamali befriended precocious West Coast teens.
“The girls in particular,” Kamali says, “were next level.” Her brother started surfing, while she took it all in, struck by “this effortlessness, this undoneness”. The way she tells it, she knew she wanted to be a designer before she started high school: “I grew up in this fashion environment, but I knew I didn’t want to do that – I wanted to make clothes.
” By the time she graduated from high school, the family had returned to Germany. She enrolled at Trier University to study garment construction, patternmaking and sewing, all of which gave her enough self-awareness to know what she was lacking: “When you create your language, your aesthetic, your handwriting as a designer,” she says, “you need more than that.” She met Wehrum, who was attending a different university, at a party.
Within that first conversation, Kamali told him her life plan: she was going to Paris to become a designer. Sounds nice, he replied. I’ll come along.
“There are some occasions in your life,” Wehrum says, “when you know that there’s something special happening.” Before she enrolled at Central Saint Martins, in London, she needed to do an internship to complete her undergraduate degree, and it is this episode that is destined to become part of the Chemena Kamali lore. “If you grew up a German girl wanting to study fashion, Karl Lagerfeld was the ultimate icon,” Kamali says.
But while many think of Lagerfeld’s work for Chanel as his defining oeuvre, it was his tenure at Chloé that spoke to Kamali. She went to the Chloé offices in person with her application; the receptionist rebuffed her, but she asked to wait. Hours later, she was given an audience with the studio manager.
Two weeks later, she was told to show up. “It’s this carelessness of youth,” she says now. “You’re not scared – you do think like, ‘This is a bit weird.
’ But you’re not afraid to do it.” Kamali remembers the Chloé studio as wild and messy, full of loud music and opinionated women. “I fell in love immediately with the energy,” she says.
For 10 hours a day, she photocopied images of Charlotte Rampling, Lauren Hutton, Jane Birkin and Jerry Hall for moodboards. “This was a starting point for my love for this era,” says Kamali, “because it’s not necessarily about the ’70s silhouette – it’s more about the spirit.” When she arrived at Saint Martins after the internship, she moved into a little Victorian house in Hackney, falling asleep on the commute to and from the college.
She studied under the legendarily discerning professor Louise Wilson. (“It looks like a Halloween costume made by a drunk mother one wet night in October” is one piece of criticism Wilson levelled at a student, recalled in a loving obituary from 2014.) Wilson was hard on Kamali, as she could be on all the students she really cared for.
“She was like, ‘You’re so German. You are always here. You always turn things in on time,’ ” Kamali recalls.
“She said, ‘I don’t want to see you here for a week.’ I want you to go out clubbing.’ ” Kamali showed up the next day, on time, as always.
“The fact that she was so hard on me prepared me for the industry,” Kamali says. At graduation, Kamali was one of the handful of students chosen to show during London Fashion Week. She was in and out of Wilson’s office 20 times a day – and later went back to her professor, sheepish over having been so difficult.
“And she’s like, ‘Don’t ever apologise for believing in the perfection of your vision: you have to fight for every single detail, because it makes a difference.’ ” Of course, the appearance of ease is almost always girded by exertion. Kamali’s floaty debut may have seemed as though it descended from a cloud, but she had been fastidiously honing her craft for decades.
After early stints at Alberta Ferretti, she moved on to Strenesse, the German heritage brand started by Gabriele Strehle. “When I first met Chemena,” says Strehle, “I saw her focus and ambition, but also I saw a woman willing to soak up all different streams, ideas and visions in order to find herself stylistically.” Having just entered her 30s, Kamali returned to Chloé, where she was first appointed a senior designer under Clare Waight Keller, before moving on to Saint Laurent in 2016.
She made a brief excursion to LA-based denim brand Frame before being offered the top position at Chloé in October of last year. In the months leading up to the February show, Kamali and her team were “off the radar with nobody watching”, she says. “It was like we were in our bubble, and it belonged to us.
” She pored over the details. The night before, Kamali and her team were fitting the models until midnight; home by 1am, she lay awake for hours before rising at 5.30 to leave her house.
Outside, in the predawn light, a neighbour waved at her and wished her luck. Just days earlier, her father, who had been quite ill for some time, died. Kamali describes calling him on one of his better days to explain her new position and how his mind sharpened around the memory of his daughter’s ambition.
“He knew,” she says. Kamali speaks of the great “clash of what life throws at you”. “I honestly don’t know how I did it.
I think I was in shock, and my body and my mind went into this weird mode.” If it later became a moment of triumph, it was also, Kamali says, “one of the hardest in my life”. Since returning to Paris last autumn, Kamali has settled with Wehrum and her children, Vito (five) and Alvar (three), in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a well-to-do neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city.
For 10 years before leaving Paris, Kamali had lived in the 9th arrondissement; her oldest son learnt to walk on the wide sidewalks of the Avenue Trudaine. The best bakery in Paris, Kamali tells me, is Mamiche, and though the rain scuttled our plan for her to tour me through her old haunts, we drop in to pick up a slice of babka. The house in Neuilly is located on a quiet street.
Inside, the wood-panelled kitchen looks over a walled garden, where a trampoline sits in a shady corner. When I arrive the day after our first meeting, the rooms are spotless, with no sign of the anarchy that small children usually wreak. “We cleaned up last night,” Kamali says, miming the frantic movements of a mother with a mission.
Upstairs, Wehrum – tall, handsome, dark-haired – is working in the living room. There is music softly playing in the background, and Wehrum will later tell me how they’ve been going to concerts together since they first met; now they try to carefully curate what they play for their kids in the car. Kamali has set up a study for herself in the house, the walls lined with racks of blouses organised in a muted rainbow; it’s more like a cosy boudoir than a place of work.
Kamali has been collecting blouses for decades and estimates that she now has about a thousand, ranging from antique Victorian garments to Karl-era Chloé artefacts to brandless button-downs. There are creative individuals who need a wide-open canvas, and those whose creativity is galvanised by the stimulus of a heritage. Kamali is firmly in the latter camp.
“It gives a strong foundation,” she asserts, “taking something from the past and translating it for today.” The day before, Kamali had taken me to the flagship store on the Rue St-Honoré. The store is a testing ground for a new “architectural concept” that will reshape Chloé’s retail spaces in the months to come, and from certain angles, resembled an art gallery, with white freshly painted walls hung with large colourful canvases from the Danish artist Mie Olise Kjærgaard, whom Kamali had selected as part of Chloé Arts, a new programme to nurture women artists.
Kamali moved through the retail space less like a gallerist and more like a new mayor: warm and friendly with her constituents, still figuring out the parameters of her authority. Back at the Chloé offices a bit later, she seemed to unwind as she led me to the archives. “I could stay here for hours,” she sighed.
Beneath the slip dresses and sequined blouses, the house’s scrupulous archivist, Géraldine-Julie Sommier, had organised various treasures. Kamali reached for one dress, and Sommier stopped her. “I can’t break the rules,” she chided, handing her a plastic glove.
“What if someone sees?” Boxes and boxes of the Lagerfeld’s legacies line the shelves. “He made the most unconstructed garments at Chloé,” said Kamali. “As few seams as possible,” Sommier continues, “as little finishing as possible.
Gaby was always telling him: ‘Lighter, lighter, lighter.’ ” “Gaby” is Gaby Aghion, the Jewish, Egypt-born whirlwind who founded Chloé in Paris in 1952. If it was Lagerfeld who established the foundational aesthetic we associate with the brand today, soon after his hiring in 1964, it was Aghion who established its free-willed quintessence.
Her first collection consisted of six dresses, inspired by the lightweight sporting-club outfits worn by women in Alexandria, and fabricated in the maid’s room in her apartment. Freedom of movement was a priority. “I started Chloé because I loved the idea of couture but found the concept a little out-of-date,” Aghion said.
“A thing of beauty and quality should be seen on women in the streets.” More than a decade before Yves Saint Laurent launched Rive Gauche, often credited with creating the concept of prêt-à-porter, or high-end, ready-to-wear clothing, Aghion was showing dresses that women could purchase as soon as they were constructed. Kamali lauds the Lagerfeld years, but she is a spiritual descendant of Aghion as well.
She describes attending a German state dinner honouring President Emmanuel Macron last spring to which she wore a loose dress from the Chloé pre-collection, adapted for modesty. “There’s nothing worse,” she says, “than being in these kinds of environments and feeling that as soon as you eat something, you just want to get it off of you.” It was unseasonably hot, Macron was late, and Kamali was amused by the men in their suits and women in their stiff dresses who flocked to her side to commend her for wearing something so light.
“I was like, ‘OK – good choice.’” I think back to this story as we settle into her home office. There is a public Chemena Kamali – the deciding vote on a hundred decisions a day, a rocketing career, a torchbearer for a female-centric brand, her next big show currently at the forefront of her mind.
(All she will tell me is that “it will be a continuation” of what she did with the first show – that palate-cleansing reset – “but also explore new areas”.) And then there is Chemena the individual, uncertain of what to wear to a state dinner, trying to squeeze in a yoga class or read a novel while balancing her rocket of a career with the demands and rewards of raising small children. Vito and Alvar are at school by the time I arrive, and their toys have been mostly put away, but I spot a particularly elaborate Hot Wheels racetrack – a favourite among my children as well – evidence that no matter how well-curated and tidy your life, the intrusions of neon plastic, or other childhood needs, are inevitable.
At the end of her debut show, when Kamali jogged out to take her bow, Vito – who had been promised a trip to the aquarium if he remained in his seat – ran to her. He had assumed she was running to him. “There’s always guilt,” Kamali says.
“When you’re at home, you feel guilty that you didn’t do something in the office. And then when you’re at the office, you feel guilty that you’re not at home.” The elusive struggle for “balance” – she winces at the term – is “more challenging than the actual job”, she says.
“What I really find hard is the struggle I have with myself.” Kamali, like so many of us, feels that paradox of being a woman: the desire to have the challenges of gender acknowledged while also disparaging gendered assumptions. When she was appointed at Chloé, there was a round of collective hand-wringing over the scarcity of female creative directors at major fashion houses, and the dialogue mildly irked her.
“It’s about talent and finding the right person for the job,” she says. In some ways, she thinks that such conversations minimise accomplishment, no matter the gender. Still, I pressed her, remembering that she had told me that Wilson, her mentor at Saint Martins, had prepared her specifically for the difficulty of being a woman in fashion.
“Yes,” she continues, things change when you start a family: “You are faced with other challenges.” She doesn’t believe, however, that the woman herself fundamentally changes: “Maybe the work gets even better.” This, too, was a sensibility that her old professor had helped her hone: you find what you love, and you give it your whole heart, and other people can feel that love as well.
Hair: James Pecis. Make-up: Lisa Butler. Nails: Anatole Rainey.
Production: VLM Production. Model: Angelina Kendall. With thanks to Debeaulieu.
