Chemena Kamali's Chloé, and the Girl Who Moves

There are shows you admire, and there are shows you feel somewhere under the ribs. On the twenty-ninth of February, 2024, Chemena Kamali sent out her first collection as creative director of Chloé, called it Intuition, and I have been turning it over ever since.

It belongs here because it isn't really about clothes. It's about a girl — a specific one, half-remembered, the kind who leaves the party early because something better is happening somewhere else. She has been living in that house since 1952. Kamali went and found her.

Kamali's history with Chloé reads like a long walk back to the same door. She arrived the first time as an intern under Phoebe Philo, young enough to be dazzled. She returned in 2013 as design director alongside Clare Waight Keller. She left again. And then, twenty years after that first afternoon, she came back to run the place.

I have a small and completely unserious stake in this, which is that my first fashion internship was at Chloé. I have never forgotten the particular charge of that building. The clothes on the rails always seemed to belong to a woman who was already out living her life and had simply left them there for a minute. So when Kamali says she walked through those doors and fell in love with a spirit, I know exactly which spirit she means.

I met her too.

Kamali showed in a raw industrial hall — plaster peeling off the walls in continents, exposed concrete columns, arched vaults, steel-framed factory windows running the full height of the space.

It opened with a black leather capelet thrown over a cream ruffled dress with sleeves that fell forever, rose-tinted sunglasses, studded sandals. From there: blouses full of flounce, hip-slung trousers, tap shorts, sheer maxi dresses, babydolls layered under big textured cape coats. Thigh-high glossy boots. Clogs. Denim. A palette of white, off-white, beige, blush, and everything earthy in between.

The Paraty satchel came back from 2008. The gold script logo belts came back from wherever they'd been waiting.

But the thing that mattered wasn't any single piece. It was that everything moved. Ruffles need a body walking to make sense of them. A sheer dress does nothing on a hanger. Kamali built a collection that only fully exists once someone puts it on and goes somewhere.

You can see it in the frames. A blush tulle cape lifting off the shoulders with the hair going the same direction. An olive plaid coat swinging open over brown leather thigh boots. A tiered white ruffle gown passing a girl in a lace blouse and flared jeans, going opposite ways. An enormous pale shearling with a cream top-handle bag swinging off the arm. Not one of those looks holds still.

That's a very specific philosophy of clothes, and it's one I happen to share. It says the garment isn't the point. You are. The garment is just what happens around you.

Then there's the casting, which is where I lost it a little.

Rianne van Rompaey. Doutzen Kroes. Jessica Miller. And sitting in the front row, watching: Jerry Hall. Pat Cleveland. Sienna Miller. Liya Kebede.

Think about what that room actually was. Pat Cleveland and Jerry Hall are the seventies Chloé that Kamali was reaching back toward — they didn't study the reference, they lived it. And there they sat while a new generation walked it past them.

That's not a show. That's a cast.

It's the same thing I keep chasing on an island in Maine, or in a hotel lobby in May: separate lives and separate decades all landing in one room at once, and the thing that comes out of the overlap being bigger than any single person in it.

Kamali said she wanted a Chloé that "radiates with warmth and positivity." What she actually built was a room where four generations of the same spirit got to look at each other.

Fashion spent a long stretch making clothes that photograph beautifully standing still. Intuition went the other way. It made clothes that only work if you're living in them.

Which is the whole argument, really. You don't become a main character by being styled. You become one by moving through your life in a way that makes people want to look.

The clothes just have to keep up.