Why Chemena Kamali Will Revitalise Chloe

Chemena 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.

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.

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