At Chloé, Chemena Kamali Finds Freedom in the Past
Two years into her tenure as creative director, Kamali discusses honoring the house’s romantic spirit while evolving its codes for a new generation.
Stepping into Chemena Kamali’s newly renovated Chloé office, in Paris’s 8th arrondissement, is a bit like stepping into her mind. Both are fresh, focused, and warmly lit—in the case of the room, with a Diptyque Feu de Bois candle; in the case of the woman, with a desire, she says, to “carry on working with the heritage of the house while writing a new legacy for Chloé,” where she has served as creative director since 2023. Try to find a screen—you won’t. Kamali has politely turned her phone face down on a table laid with canisters of cashews, a box of chocolates, and a bowl of blueberries. On her desk, a stack of leather-bound journals overwhelms a closed laptop, and an old-school fan whirls away. “When I arrived here yesterday, I said, ‘Okay, this is a good place to start,’ ” says Kamali, taking in the freshly painted walls in the atelier. “It gives you a clean headspace.”
We’re in the waning days of August, and Kamali has just gotten back from several weeks’ holiday on Patmos. “We were supposed to go to some other Greek islands, but we liked it so much we decided to stay,” she says. There was swimming. There was reading—not one but two Susan Sontag books (On Women and Against Interpretation and Other Essays). Kamali mostly retreated into herself, she says, yet she couldn’t help snapping a few photos, aide-mémoires for a certain intriguing way that women were draping their pareos around their hips. The moment went straight into her memory bank, a reservoir of feelings and impressions from which Kamali draws her best ideas. “I love to catch an atmosphere,” she says. “It’s extremely reassuring for me, because everything moves all the time.” You heard it here first, if a few months from now we’re all dressing in beach towels.
Two years into her tenure, Kamali has solidified her place in the upper echelons of French fashion, infusing Chloé with a modern take on the buoyant, easy spirit that has characterized the house from its founding, in 1952, by Gaby Aghion. Kamali’s acclaimed first collection was shown in 2024, after the designer Gabriela Hearst exited the brand. It featured the sort of patent leather half capes, fluttery lace blouses, and liquidy gowns for which Chloé was beloved in the 1970s, under Karl Lagerfeld, and then in the early 2000s, when the Glastonbury Festival met the legendary Parisian nightclub Les Bains in the designs of Phoebe Philo and Clare Waight Keller. “In the streets of Paris and elsewhere, we missed this Chloé girl so much,” Le Figaro’s fashion critic wrote after Kamali’s debut.
Model Angelina Kendall wears Chloé clothing and accessories throughout.
The Chloé girl might be a Parisian archetype, but Kamali, 43, grew up in Dortmund, Germany, near Düsseldorf. Her parents owned several multilabel boutiques called Euro Mode. “I was never interested in selling, per se,” she explains. “What was so magical for me were the fittings, that ceremony of people trying things on.” It was the late ’80s, and Germany had, basically, two major national icons: “There was Karl Lagerfeld and Boris Becker,” Kamali recalls. She chose the sketch pad over the racket. “We all had these typical German slam books, and you’d fill out your favorite movie and what you wanted to be or whatever, and I wrote ‘Modeschöpfer,’ which is German for ‘couturier.’ ” From the age of 8, she never wavered: “This was quite distinctive from the rest of my friends or classmates. There was a very determined, clearheaded obsession about fashion very early on.”
Kamali has always been a paper person—a lover of print, a keeper of records. “Any family member who asked me what I wanted for Christmas or my birthday, I always said magazine subscriptions,” she recalls. The titles piled up: American Vogue, Italian Vogue, W. On the cusp of adolescence, Kamali was probably operating Dortmund’s finest fashion library. “I turned into a very nerdy encyclopedia,” she says. Soon she was cutting out magazine pages and photographs she loved and gluing them into notebooks, collaging them with her own drawings. When she was 11, the family moved to California, where some relatives had already immigrated. “I was incredibly excited to be in a completely different aesthetic world,” says Kamali. “And I still love this European preciseness with a Californian undoneness.”
Even now, Kamali is obsessive about safeguarding references and tracking the creation of every look. “I love recording all the steps of my process, because for me it’s like a creative visual diary,” she explains. “You explore so many different pathways—sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. By recording it, you preserve the ideas, even if they’re killed or modified and become something else.”
This archival urge most often takes the form of photos, shot with iPhone, Polaroid, and digital cameras, printed out, and sorted into boxes that she sources from a specialist art supply store in Paris. (Each box has a digital backup, just in case.) Documenting, for Kamali, is also a way of encouraging transparency in an era in which trends seem to surge up out of the digital morass, with little ownership or explanation. “It doesn’t have to be all about the finished product,” she says. “I think in the times we’re living in, people are interested in seeing where things are coming from—what was the starting point, what were the influences?”
Unlike other designers, Kamali is unusually willing to pull the curtain back on how she works. For this story, she considered Chloé’s essential design signatures—the billowy blouse, mousseline, denim, and lace, among others—and selected a look to capture the spirit of each one. “I love working with the past, and I love working with codes. I’m not afraid of them,” she says. “I don’t want to fight them—it’s about embracing them but making them evolve.” Think of Kamali’s detailed, personal telling of the Chloé story as the opposite of AI slop.
Kamali was 22 and fresh out of Germany’s Trier University of Applied Sciences when she joined Chloé for the first time, as an intern, in 2003. She had gained a highly technical education: garment construction, patternmaking, art history, chemistry. The Paris dream that she had been nurturing ever since her collaging days beckoned, so she begged her way into the atelier, headed at the time by Phoebe Philo. “There was this energy and atmosphere, this complicity,” she recalls. “Women designing for women, and it was so relatable and honest. You kind of wanted to be that girl.”
Over the past 20 years, Kamali has made herself into that girl. After the internship, there was an MA at Central Saint Martins, in London, where she learned to channel her technical prowess into a creative sensibility, followed by stints at Alberta Ferretti and Strenesse, in Milan. Kamali returned to Chloé in 2012 for a little over three years, under Clare Waight Keller. But in 2016, Saint Laurent poached her to become design director of women’s ready-to-wear. The news that Kamali was coming back to Chloé, in the fall of 2023, had the heartwarming logic of one of those wedding announcements that recall how the bride and the groom fell in love in first grade, went their separate ways, and reconnected, with great joy, in midlife. “I always had this really strong affinity for Chloé because the emotional aspect spoke to me very purely and very deeply,” says Kamali. “There aren’t a lot of brands that have this honest voice that goes beyond fashion. I was drawn to the idea of a certain natural femininity, freedom, sensuality, and lightness.”
Kamali came in with a plan. “The pitch was essentially that I wanted to bring back the old fan base,” she says. “Because I knew it was out there—my generation of women who have a memory with Chloé, whether it’s a blouse that they loved or the first perfume they wore.” Kamali’s instincts have proven correct: Her first front row—stacked with millennial icons such as Sienna Miller and Liya Kebede, all outfitted in nostalgic, graffitied cork wedges, their legs crossed so that the shoes hung in the air just so—caused a sensation. (Just don’t mention “boho chic”—at Kamali’s Chloé, the phrase is banned.)
Memory, meme-ified; fandom, activated: Depop, the fashion resale site, reported a 1,137 percent increase in searches since June for the Paddington, the quintessential Chloé bag. Parent company Richemont’s latest annual report noted that sales rose by double digits across its clothing brands, “with an encouraging performance from Chloé.” Kamali says, “In the first and second years, the thing I really wanted to accomplish was to clean up and bring everyone on board and make sure we really navigated the house back to its original roots.”
Now Kamali is moving into the second phase of the plan. It’s all about demonstrating that, in addition to Chloé’s famously fluid look, the house possesses an intellectual suppleness. “What’s really important as I move forward is the understanding that there’s not just one Chloé woman,” Kamali says. In our conversation, certain words surface again and again: “freedom,” “motion,” “flow.” I’m curious about the Chloé palette—famously identifiable, with dusty roses and washed-out sea foams and chalky caramels, yet also famously tricky to wear for women in a certain range of skin tones. “It’s a very valid question, because not everybody loves those colors,” says Kamali. “What I want to do is extend this predetermined idea of ‘Chloé is this’ or ‘Chloé is that.’ It’s good to have these very strong codes that we all associate with a house, but there’s space for moving on from them while preserving the legacy and paying tribute to it.”
Changes that might once have been perceived as heresy feel like a natural progression under Kamali’s gentle stewardship. Chloé was founded explicitly as a ready-to-wear brand, one of the first to encourage women to swear off onerous fittings and instead turn to ease and convenience. Yet, Kamali says, “even though we’re not a couture house, recently I’ve been inspired by the idea of couture.” She continues: “What would it be like if you took all the heavy construction out of those dresses, and you could just put them in the washing machine and completely destroy the preciousness, you know?” Her answer, combining “couture preciseness and light summer cottons,” sounds tantalizing.
Behind us, there’s a magnet wall covered in images and swatches of fabric. It’s not a mood board, exactly, but an extension of the documentation process that Kamali holds so dear, allowing her to get where she’s going by chronicling how she started. We stand up from the table and get closer: There are Guy Bourdin’s leggy, Surrealist women in advertising campaigns for Charles Jourdan, and many pictures from Gaby Aghion’s first Chloé shows, which were held in the late ’50s at Café de Flore and Brasserie Lipp. Kamali is particularly enthusiastic about a book she recently picked up called Shtetl in the Sun: Andy Sweet’s South Beach 1977–1980. She points to the wall, where she’s stuck a picture of senior citizens sunning themselves. “I love the prints, the bathing suits, these old hotels and pools. There’s something so fascinating about these images and the eccentricity.”
I can’t help but notice the hot pinks and lime greens that are popping out of the photos, the apple reds and cornflower blues. “I want to get into some of the colors,” says Kamali, picking up from our discussion about updating the Chloé palette. “I want to go into vivid saturation.” She takes a minute and smiles. “This house really makes me happy and really makes me proud. I brought back the initial, original idea of what Chloé should feel like. But now I’m free to make it evolve, and free to move on.”
Scenes from the model fittings for Chloé’s fall 2025 ready-to-wear show, with some of Kamali’s inspiration images for the collection.
Chemena Kamali: Hair by John Nollet at Forty-One Studio + Agency; Makeup by Anthony Preel at MA+ Group. Photo Assistant: Ryan O’Toole; Digital Technician: Romain Forquay; On-Set Production: Justine Torres at Brachfeld; Hair Assistant: Antonin Gacquer.
Hair by Sébastien Richard at Artlist Paris; makeup by Anthony Preel for Violette_FR at MA+ Group; manicure by Cam Tran for Manucurist at Artlist Paris. Model: Angelina Kendall at the Industry NY. Casting by Ashley Brokaw Casting. Set design by Hamid Shams.
Produced by Brachfeld; Producer: Anaïs Diouane; Location Manager: Georges Jacqueline; Lighting Director: Ryan O’Toole; Photo Assistant: Max Zimmerman; Digital Technician: Romain Forquy; Retouching: May Ldn; Fashion Assistant: Anne Elizabeth Voortmeijer; Production Assistants: Loris Pugnet, Adrien Sagot; Set Assistant: Alban Diaz. Émile Aillaud & Fabio Rieti, Tours Aillaud/Laurence Rieti, Snake Sculpture, © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
