Chemena Kamali on Femininity, Energy Dressing, and Remaking Chloé for a New Period

Kamali has arrange a examine for herself in the home, the partitions lined with racks of blouses organized in a muted rainbow; it’s extra like a comfy boudoir than a workplace. Kamali has been accumulating blouses for many years and estimates that she now has a couple of thousand, starting from vintage Victorian clothes to Karl-era Chloé artifacts to brandless button-downs. Overflow is saved within the basement and at her mother and father’ home.

There are inventive people who want a wide-open canvas, and people whose creativity is galvanized by the stimulus of a heritage. Kamali is firmly within the latter camp. “It offers a robust basis,” she asserts, “taking one thing from the previous and translating it for as we speak.” And whereas she presumably had a hand in inviting Sienna Miller, a.ok.a. the queen of boho stylish, to her first present, she dismisses the time period boho stylish—the vintage-inspired aesthetic ascendant within the early aughts, hooked up to manufacturers like Isabel Marant and Ulla Johnson, and the phrase most frequently used to explain Kamali’s work. To her, it’s reductive, devoid of broader historic influences.

The day earlier than, Kamali had taken me to the flagship retailer on Rue St-Honoré, which was gleaming with freshly painted partitions, the clipped steps of staff echoing on the polished flooring. The shop is an ongoing testing floor for a brand new “architectural idea” that may reshape Chloé’s retail areas within the months to return, Kamali mentioned. From sure angles, it resembled an artwork gallery, with white partitions hung with giant colourful canvases from the Danish painter Mie Olise Kjærgaard, whom Kamali had chosen as a part of Chloé Arts, a brand new program to nurture feminine artists. An emphasis on creative and private narrative is central to Kamali’s Chloé: “It’s not nearly giving feminine artists a platform—it’s additionally about their tales.” (At one level, she describes a trend present as “a poem, a brief story, slightly film” coming along with a starting, center, and finish.) Kamali moved by the retail area much less like a gallerist and extra like a brand new mayor: heat and pleasant together with her constituents, however nonetheless determining the parameters of her authority.

Again on the Chloé workplaces a bit later, she appeared to unwind as she led me to the archives. “I might keep right here for hours,” she sighed. Beneath the slip clothes and sequined blouses, the home’s scrupulous archivist, Géraldine-​Julie Sommier, had organized varied artifacts—​a Nineteen Fifties newspaper clipping discussing “La Tremendous Femme,” for instance, positioned under a proto–​energy swimsuit. Kamali reached for one costume, and Sommier stopped her. “I can’t break the foundations,” she chided, handing her a plastic glove. “What if somebody sees?” Close to a white crocheted minidress, a black-​and-​white photograph exhibits Kamali, again when she was only a designer, adjusting the exact same costume. Packing containers and bins of Lagerfeld’s artifacts line the cabinets. “He made probably the most unconstructed clothes at Chloé,” mentioned Kamali. “As few seams as attainable,” Sommier continued, “as little ending as attainable. Gaby was all the time telling him: ‘Lighter, lighter, lighter.’ ”