Chemena Kamali on Femininity, Power Dressing, and Remaking Chloé for a New Era (2024)

Paris, like many cities in the summer, is on edge. There are snarls of traffic clogging the streets; entire thoroughfares are closed. Inside the Chloé headquarters on Avenue Percier, however, a calmer mood pervades. Chemena Kamali opens the door to her office, revealing a long, curved couch, pink peonies in a vase, and a silver tray laid with tea. On the wall is an orderly grid of images: bathing suits designed by Karl Lagerfeld during his time at the fashion house, Mick Jagger, bra-strap tan lines, a cigarette balanced between pouting lips. Kamali, 42, tall and slim, dressed in high-waist, wide-leg Chloé jeans and a latte-colored blouse, welcomes me in.

With her deep-set eyes and Botticelli waves, Kamali is full of chatter about the weather, the mugs we’re sipping from, the store walk-through she will do later today. She grins regularly, a warm, Cheshire Cat–like smile that spreads across her entire face.

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 label of clothing 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 center, she also recognizes that the outlook and ethos of the house dovetails nicely with her own style, which juxtaposes traditional femininity with carefree cool. Later, I asked if a Chemena Kamali label would look different from her work for Chloé. (Hearst kept her own label while at the helm of the brand.) She doubts it: “A lot of what I’m doing is from a really honest place,” she says, “just expressing the most honest form of femininity.”

That “honest form of femininity” seems to be resonating in an astonishingly assured way. Kamali’s first runway show, in February this year, was met with one of the warmest receptions in recent history. There were sheer lacy blouses and rippling layers, everything in soft and appealing fabrics, punctuated by pieces with backbone: thigh-high boots, metallic belts, leather and vinyl capelets—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 roll out their 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 spontaneous 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 percent spike in searches for Chloé the day after the show—and a 130 percent jump in sales the followingmonth.

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 dresslike 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 election of Donald Trump—comes to mind.) And with the threat of another Trump presidency on the horizon—and a beacon of hope in Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy—there will of course be political messages aplenty this fall. Kamali has, in fact, already been intimately involved with that more subtle but no less powerful signaling, dressing the vice president for two appearances at the Democratic National Convention, first in a cheekily named “coconut brown” suit and then in a navy outfit on the final night, when the candidate 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 but 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 spontaneous, adventurous people,” Kamali says, “wanting their kids to see all different sides of the world.” The couple settled in the town of Dortmund, near Düsseldorf, and later opened clothing boutiques.

Early on, Kamali, a shy child with a strong will, would go to trade fairs with her parents. “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 store, and Kamali befriended precocious West Coast teens, light-years ahead of her German classmates. “The girls in particular,” Kamali says, “were next level.” It was the era of Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins, of MTV and teen magazines. Her brother started surfing, while she took it all in, struck by “this effortlessness, this undoneness—in the attitude, in the clothing, the music.” She spent much of her free time clipping images from international issues of Vogue. 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 moved back to Germany, and 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. “She clearly back then already had a very distinctive look,” says Wehrum. 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.” The two separated that night without exchanging phone numbers, but found each other years later and began dating long-distance as Wehrum finished his PhD in economics.

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. Because she was coming from a lesser-known German university, she suspected her application to intern at Chloé (then under Philo) was unlikely to get much attention, and so she went to the offices in person. The receptionist rebuffed her, but she explained that she would be taking the train straight back to Germany and 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, reflecting. “You’re not scared—you do think like, This is a bit weird. But you’re not afraid to do it.”

Kamali moved into an apartment in the 1st arrondissem*nt, wallpapered in floral prints, with the kitchen in a cupboard and a toilet under the shower. She 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. She stood at the photocopier for 10 hours a day, xeroxing images of Charlotte Rampling, Lauren Hutton, Jane Birkin, and Jerry Hall for mood boards. The other interns—she was the youngest—complained, but she thought it amazing to see the inspiration firsthand. “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 a gritty neighborhood in Hackney, falling asleep on the long bus and Tube commute to and from campus. Some of her classmates already had their own brands and were doing the MA as a kind of reset, while she was just beginning to know herself. 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 leveled at a pupil, recalled in a loving obituary from 2014.) Wilson was hard on Kamali, as she was on all the students she really cared for, instructing her to forget all the exacting skills she had diligently obtained. “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. When half the class was—as was conventional—kicked out by the second year, the dynamic shifted. The criticism felt more directed: “She just wanted to squeeze everything out of you—to get to the brutal heart of who you were,” says Kamali. “The fact that she was so hard on me just prepared me for the industry.” At graduation, Kamali was one of the handful of students who was chosen to show her work during London Fashion Week. She was in and out of Wilson’s office 20 times a day, obsessing over the models—and later went back to her professor, sheepish over having been so difficult. “And she’s like, ‘Don’t ever apologize for believing in the perfection of your vision: You have to think it through to the very smallest detail, and you have to fight for every single detail, because it makes a difference.’ ”

Of course, the appearance of ease is almost always girded by hours of exertion. Those laid-back California surfers put in their time sweating under the sun. Kamali’s floaty debut collection 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, which earned a reputation in the ’90s for its clean, well-constructed minimalism—a downtown, gallery-​owner aesthetic. “When I first met Chemena,” says Strehle, one of her early mentors, “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.” Kamali then returned to Chloé, where she was design director underClare Waight Keller, before moving on to Saint Laurent in 2016. She made a brief excursion to the Culver City headquarters of denim brand Frame before being offered the top position at Chloé in October of 2023. The LA adventure had been a dream for Kamali—propelled by childhood memories of the beach—but she and Wehrum had no choice but to cut it short. Some of their furniture was still making its way to America when they turned around.

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, just as she had obsessed over her first show, barely sleeping. The night before, Kamali and her team were fitting the models until midnight; home by 1a.m., she lay awake for hours before finally giving up and rising at 5:30 to leave her house. Outside, in the predawn light, a neighbor waved at her and wished her luck.

Just days earlier, her father, who had been quite ill for some time, abruptly 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” when she describes those days before her first show. “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. I know that he would’ve said to me, ‘You have to do this. You have to stay focused and do this.’ I think that helped me.” 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 fall, Kamali has settled with Wehrum and their children, Vito (five) and Alvar (three), in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a leafy neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. They moved there somewhat reluctantly, knowing the family had been spoiled by the space of California. For 10 years before leaving Paris, Kamali had lived in the 9th arrondissem*nt, where children play in a quaint square with a carousel at its center while parents sip wine at the café on the corner. Her oldest son learned to walk on the wide sidewalks of the Avenue Trudaine, and the area became the family’s whole universe at the start of the pandemic. 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 ground-floor wood-paneled kitchen looks over a walled-in garden, where an olive tree is hung with egg-shaped ornaments—remnants of a long-ago Easter party—and 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, save for a few colorful drawings posted on a bulletin board in the kitchen. “We cleaned up last night,” Kamali says, laughing and miming the frantic movements of a mother with a mission. For all of her free-spirit vibes, Kamali is unceasingly meticulous. She takes me upstairs, where Wehrum—a tall, handsome, dark-haired man whose somewhat stern-seeming exterior dissipates when he speaks or laughs—is working in the living room. There is music softly playing in the background, and Wehrum will later tell me how important music is to both of them. They’ve been going to concerts together since they first met, as well as electronic music venues in Berlin and Frankfurt; 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 organized in a muted rainbow; it’s more like a cozy 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 artifacts to brandless button-downs. Overflow is stored in the basem*nt and at her parents’ house.

There are creative individuals who need a wide-open canvas, and those whose creativity is galvanized 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.” And while she presumably had a hand in inviting Sienna Miller, a.k.a. the queen of boho chic, to her first show, she dismisses the term boho chic—the vintage-inspired aesthetic ascendant in the early aughts, attached to brands like Isabel Marant and Ulla Johnson, and the phrase most often used to describe Kamali’s work. To her, it’s reductive, devoid of broader historical influences.

The day before, Kamali had taken me to the flagship store on Rue St-Honoré, which was gleaming with freshly painted walls, the clipped steps of employees echoing on the polished floors. The store is an ongoing testing ground for a new “architectural concept” that will reshape Chloé’s retail spaces in the months to come, Kamali said. From certain angles, it resembled an art gallery, with white walls hung with large colorful canvases from the Danish painter Mie Olise Kjærgaard, whom Kamali had selected as part of Chloé Arts, a new program to nurture female artists. An emphasis on artistic and personal narrative is central to Kamali’s Chloé: “It’s not just about giving female artists a platform—it’s also about their stories.” (At one point, she describes a fashion show as “a poem, a short story, a little movie” coming together with a beginning, middle, and end.) Kamali moved through the retail space less like a gallerist and more like a new mayor: warm and friendly with her constituents, but 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 organized various artifacts—​a 1950s newspaper clipping discussing “La Super Femme,” for example, placed below a proto–​power suit. 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?” Near a white crocheted minidress, a black-​and-​white photo shows Kamali, back when she was just a designer, adjusting the very same dress. Boxes and boxes of Lagerfeld’s artifacts line the shelves. “He made the most unconstructed garments at Chloé,” said Kamali. “As few seams as possible,” Sommier continued, “as little finishing as possible. Gaby was always telling him: ‘Lighter, lighter, lighter.’ ”

“Gaby” is Gaby Aghion, the Jewish, Egyptian-born whirlwind who founded Chloé in Paris in 1952. If it was Lagerfeld who established the codes we associate with the brand soon after his hiring in 1964, it was Aghion who established its free-willed DNA. “I’ve got to work,” Aghion told her husband the year she founded the label. “It’s not enough to eat lunch.”

Aghion’s 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—from the simple material generally used to cut the patterns for couture. 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.

While it is abundantly clear that Kamali lauds the Lagerfeld years, she is a spiritual descendant of Aghion as well. She describes attending a German state dinner honoring President Emmanuel Macron last spring. Flattered by the invitation, she was also anxious about choosing an outfit that would meet the formality of the occasion. In the end, 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, Okay—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 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.”)

“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. “I feel like I’ve prepared for the job for the last 20 years. I come in in the morning and I’m just like, I love what I’m doing. But what I really find hard is the struggle I have with myself.” And it is exhausting. Kamali tells me of a business trip she moved up by a day—to acclimate to the time change, but also just to get a good night’s sleep in a hotel room, liberated from the daily domestic clamor.

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. “I do not think gender should not play a role,” she says. “I just don’t think it should be about, Okay—we want to have a woman at the helm of this house, or We want to have a man. It’s about talent and finding the right person for the job.” In some ways, she thinks that such conversations minimize accomplishment, no matter the gender. Still, I press her, remembering that she had told me that her mentor at Saint Martins, Louise Wilson, 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: “You are as passionate and hardworking and motivated as before—and 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.

In this story: For Kamali: hair, John Nollet; makeup, Karin Westerlund. For Angelina: hair, James Pecis; makeup, Lisa Butler. Manicurist: For Kamali: Sylvie Vacca; for Angelina: Anatole Rainey. Produced by VLM Productions.