Chemena Kamali from Chloe: Queen of the blouse

On the second floor of Villa in the nineteenth century near Boyce de Bolononi, it overlooks a park that lives in Tramolin for the child and many plastic motorcycles, there is a room full of blouses. Hundreds of blouses.

Lace lace of Victorian era and a large shoulder blouses of the eighties. Blouses in Bezley and leopard printing. Familiar proportional blouses – UNGARO, Yves Saint Laurent, Georgio de Saint Angelo – and blouses at all. The rainbow of blouses is arranged by color on six clothes.

Welcome to the mind – or, instead, the home office – Kima Kamali, creative director of Chloé.

If you want to understand how, in just two seasons, Chloe turned from a house for younger women but increasingly into one of the most important fashion stickers, not to mention the uniforms of wonderful girls such as Suki Waterphans and Sina Miller (during her candidacy for the president, Kamala Harris), you must understand MSS Kamali.

She had gathered her 25 years ago and has more than 1500 blues: at her parents ’house in Germany, in storage in France, nearly 500 in her home alone. For her, the blouse-which is not relatively estimated, is from school uniforms, Edoarist breeders and vocational girls in the 1970s who lost his priority in women’s treasury to shirts decades-in reality is perfect Platonic for clothes.

“The development of the blouse is the development of femininity in some way, and the development of fashion,” said Ms. Kamali recently, tucked in one of the giant leather chairs in her office. Regardless of the blouses, the large normative office of the eighties, some pottery and the family family are the only creatures in the room. She and her husband, Konstantin and Wrum, and their two sons, who were between the ages of 3 and 5, moved to the house when she got the job in Chloe last year – they were on their way to California – and she had no much time to empty her.

“Historically, she was the man’s ambassador’s blouse,” she said. When you talk about something you love, you can hear it while working through its ideas in the actual time: “Then, in the Victorian era, the blouse became feminine. After the war, I got more opponent.

This is a lot of meaning to be loaded on clothes, but for Mrs. Kamali, the blouse is not just a fabric with buttons.

The shirt on her back

Nobody wears a better blouse than Mrs. Kamali, nor until they turn like Carly Close Willia Kepidi, who began to tie the front rows of the front of her wooden peaks and wooden platforms. The model costume of Mrs. Kamali begins with a kidney blouse from her own design or one of her collection, and is often in an elderly ivory with a touch of embroidery to mysteriously adding bohemian air.

She said, “Blouse is much easier than the dress.”

They are skipping on kidney trousers, tearing it on the edge, high -garbage and intertwined necklaces, some are new, and some are sources in the same old markets where you find their blouses. With brown hair along the excessive waist in the middle and a face-free face frame, it creates Vibi is Hobe in Venice-although Mrs. Kamali has mostly grew up in Dortmund, Germany-effect. If Steve Nix has a daily job in the investment capital fund, it may look like this.

“She is ambitious,” said actress Rashida Jones, who met Mrs. Kamali a year ago. “But this does not feel verified. It is a feeling on the ground.”

Kaya Jerber, who was designed for Mrs. Kamali and wearing her clothes from the runway, puts it in this way.

Mrs. Kamali, 43, began collecting blouses in 2003, which was close to her first work in Chloe. She knew that she wanted to be designed when she was a child, and in Germany, she said, this means being like Karl Lagerfeld, the most famous German designer, who was at the time in Chloe. She went to the University of Applied Sciences in Trier, Germany, and spoke on her way to Chloe as a trainee during the Fellow era.

She said: “The first designer I bought, in fact, was to sell the company’s employees for 50 euros,” she said, referring to a white shirt with a “necklace” of silver tears woven in the foreground. “Then my old concern started, because I remember the team members who return from the large pirate trips and empty the treasures they found. I realized how some of the source pieces could lead to a creative process that can flow to the concept of the group.”

She obtained a certificate from the Central St. Martins, worked in Alberta Ferretti. Chloe again, under Claire White Keeler; Then Saint Laurent before returning to Chloe in the higher position. But wherever she went, Mrs. Kamali continued to buy blouses. She does not buy, as many university schools do, for historical or material value, but according to the details that attract her attention – “the size or building of the sleeves or the yoke.”

As a result, its cut is not expensive. She said it ranges from “very cheap to $ 700”, although the average is about $ 300. They are their sources from EBY, who are ancient exhibitions like the current relationship in Los Angeles and what has turned into a network of ancient merchants.

She said, “You go to a store, go to the market and meet with this person who says,” Well, you want more, I have some things in my basement. “

All blouses all the time

The blouse is an important part of Chloe aesthetic, when the Jewish Museum in New York kept a major retro -impact dedicated to Chloé in 2023, devoted a full room for the blouse. As clothing, it envelops the easy female tone that the founder, Gabi Agon, was placed in 1952, and it was repeated to various domains by the designers who came after that, including Mr. Lagerfield, Stella McCartney, Mrs. Keeler, Gabriella Hurst.

But while they all made blouses, they did not make them one of their aesthetics like Mrs. Kamali. “The way she is connected to the basic values ​​of the home,” said Philip Fortonato, CEO of Fashion and Accessories at Richmont, the Swiss bloc that owns Chloe.

In fact, the first lady Kamali collection of Chloé was built around a blouse. Specifically, Karl Lagerfeld is designed for Chloé with a black head of compact species on top. She said the blouse obtained it “consider how the cape is a creative piece in Chloe’s history.”

Just as the lace in Victorian blouse inspired LACY levels in the last group, which was visible not only in actual blouses, but also on the field with the effect of blouses and dresses that appear to be longer versions of blouses.

As for her third group, it was revealed on March 6, Mrs. Kamali was thinking about something that Karl Lagerfeld once said about “the basic idea is the simplest of everything: blouse and skirt.”

She said: “This type of the idea of ​​seeing a truly vision of the blouse is not as a component of appearance, but as a major component,” she said. This, in turn, led her to the idea of ​​a blouse as a container of historical shrapnel: the cover of the Dolman, a collar or an exaggerated shoulder. All this made their way to the group.

“It is not about copying,” she said. “It comes to using the blouse as a way to root things in the past or in traditions.” And indicating that it has a place in the future.

As Lauren Santo Domingo, the founder of the worker Moda, it works. Mrs. Santo Domingo said Chloe is “one of our fastest sales designers,” noting that Chloe Tops has grown at 138 percent since the first groups of Mrs. Kamali appeared.

For the photographer David Sims, who shoots Chloe campaigns, Mrs. Kamali has mainly created “representing a new type of French women, with a play about nudity and embroidery that suggests ownership of sexual energy and power that appears to be an answer to many of the recent questions.” Questions about sex and stereotypes; Questions about male look. He said that doing this through the perspective of the dress that was mainly deported to the fashion box and old rock music stars is a kind of “radical”.

But this tension is actually a kidney point for Mrs. Kamali, who took a kidney girl and grows her to a woman.

Mrs. Kamali said: “The term” Chloe Girl “is linked to how the world realizes the home in the first place. But the word “girl” is reduced. I never want a kidney woman to be only one. There is no woman. She has a change of mood and feelings. Easy and optimism always exists with stress. These contradictions and these opposites are what makes everything interesting. “

Including, perhaps in particular, the shirt on your back.