Kristina Parsons
The Jewish Museum Presents: Virtual Curator Talk: Mood of the Moment: Gaby Aghion and the House of Chloé
The Jewish Museum Presents - Virtual Curator Talk: Mood of the Moment - Gaby Aghion and the House of Chloé
- Okay, thank you, Wendy. Thank you, everybody. I’m Claudia Gould. I’m the director emerita of The Jewish Museum. This exhibition actually came about in literally on Valentine’s Day 2019, speaking to a friend who was a consultant, Dennis Freedman, for Chloe at the time. And he turned to me. We were in Houston, Texas, and he said, “Did you know that Gaby Aghion, the person who started Chloe?” I said, “Who’s Gaby Aghion? Right, who would know who she is?” Is a Egyptian Jew. And she moved to Paris in 1942 and began Chloe in the early ‘50s to cater to women who, one, could not afford to be in Dior, and to dress better than the knock-offs that were being made by her, you know, how everyone was knocking off the new look. So we did, he goes, “This would be a perfect show for The Jewish Museum.” And as you know or if you’ve been following the programme of the museum, we’re very interested in architecture and design. We did an amazing Isaac Mizrahi show, another one about fashioning Jewish dress, and a lot of design exhibitions. So I thought, I contacted, I was put in touch with Chloe immediately, Riccardo Bellini, who was the CEO at the time of Chloe. So let’s just see, this is February 2019. And we all know what happened, you know, a month later. So this exhibition took a lot of twists and turns. Once we were able to go to Paris, and I should also say that neither Kristina or I is the curator of the exhibition. We hired someone that we knew.
Her name is Choghakate Kazarian, who grew up in Paris but is from Azerbaijan and Lebanon, and she lived in New York. And she’s a modernist curator of mostly just painting and sculpture and drawings. But she worked at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris and we thought that she would be a really great person who was an outsider in Paris, looking in, to be the curator for the show. It was her first exhibition on fashion and clothing. And then Kristina, who is part of the curatorial team at The Jewish Museum, and then myself, we actually forged this forward. We did a magnificent exhibition catalogue with great essays. All the photographs are, we commissioned the photography in Paris with Chloe. And so the book is a true collaboration with Chloe, and the exhibition is truly ours. So fast forward, it opened in October of 2023. So yes, exhibitions do take a long time, and especially where there’s COVID in the middle and you’re working on a, you know, on an international front. So I am going to pass this on to Kristina Parsons, happy to answer any other questions after. But Kristina is going to give you a walk-through of the exhibition. And as I said, she is an assistant curator at the museum, and she came to the museum because of her deep interest in and our dabbling in exhibitions in design and architecture. She came from the Cooper Hewitt, and maybe Kristina wants to say a little bit more about herself, but I think we can just move forward and you’ll see.
- Yeah. It’s very nice to meet you all. Thank you, Claudia, for that very kind introduction and for the really pivotal background of this project, which really has been such a joy to work on. And even more joyful that we get to share it all with you today. So I thought what we could so, since we are using the Zoom format, is walk through our exhibition and the project, tell you a bit more about the history of the brand and Gaby, but also use the screen format to show some images that help give a bit of the context and understanding. So I’m going to start sharing my screen and we will jump right in. Everyone is hopefully seeing my screen now. And I’ll just jump right into it. I think if you have heard of the fashion brain Chloe but never of its founder, Gaby Aghion, that is very much the crux of this project. Gaby established the brand in 1952, and her vital contributions to fashion have really been thus far overlooked. We are so proud to be telling the story of such an important Jewish figure and an innovative entrepreneur, especially because the way in which Gaby thought about Chloe existing was to propose a way of dressing for women that would really allow its wearers to meet the cultural context of their times with this very light and elegant expression of femininity. And this idea of femininity was adaptable. It could shift and change as kind of popular tastes and aesthetics shifted over time. Importantly too, Gaby wanted to find a niche in the fashion market, one that she recognised as a buyer and consumer and lover of fashion. She really saw that there was an opportunity to create something that hadn’t existed before, something that sat in between bespoke, very expensive, and elite haute couture designs on the one hand and mass-produced, ready-to-wear garments on the other. Now, our exhibition and the book that Claudia mentioned that accompanies this project follows this thread of Gaby’s founding of the brand through its 70-plus-year history.
And what you’re seeing on the screen now are photos that were taken for the publication that are just really, I think, such lovely images of the garments. They’re examples from Chloe’s earliest years all the way through to today. And as I said, Gaby’s contributions to fashion history through Chloe, her contributions to modern dress practise really have been largely overlooked in fashion discourse. I am someone who came from a fashion background, and I have to say, there is such little mention of Chloe in the kind of canon of American and European fashion histories that this project really was filling a vital hole in showcasing how Gaby’s daring vision really led to this development of a new fashion mode, as I was saying, that unique cross between the luxury and artistry of haute couture and the convenience and ease of ready-to-wear. But before we get into all of that, I just wanted to back up and introduce you really to the star of our show and tell you a bit more about Gaby Aghion herself, the influences and motivations that she was drawing on when she was developing the Chloe brand. So what I’ll share with you are a few images of her, which are just really gorgeous, some examples of the ways in which Chloe was promoted in early press in fashion magazines, like “Elle” and “Vogue,” to really underscore how her ideas about fashion were shared amongst consumers. And I’ll also walk you through a kind of virtual tour of our show, showing you what the installation actually looks like, as well as some more detail shots of the garments themselves. So Gaby. Two beautiful images of Gaby here.
Gaby was born in Alexandria in Egypt in 1921 and grew up in an educated, upper-class family. She spoke French, Italian, and English, but mostly French. And Gaby and her mother were particularly fond of fashions that they would see in French fashion magazines that really disseminated this idea of Parisian elegance being the height of desirability and luxury. From an early age, Aghion would work with the local seamstress to recreate the designs that she and her mother saw in these French fashion magazines, like “Le Jardin des Modes,” for example. And while Gaby would be inspired by the drawings, she would select the fabrics herself and make a lot of modifications that really created a garment that suited her own tastes. And on the left, you can see an example of a dress that Aghion had designed herself when she was just around 15 years old. She was a very active young woman. She swam nearly every day. She loved the beach. And she spent quite a lot of time with her family at the sporting clubs in Alexandria, which really were the seat of social life for someone of her status. These two threads of being both directly involved in the creation of garments, choosing how to adorn one’s own body, and of being a very physically active woman were really two key influences for Gaby when she would go on to establish Chloe as a young woman. Despite leaving Egypt, I think this influence of her very playful childhood and the sweeping sands of the Egyptian desert that you see her kind of languishing in on the right, this vision really stayed with her and manifested in her vision for Chloe and her approach to women’s fashion. She said once that, “When you touch sand, it’s like silk on your hands and it has this kind of rose-tinted beige colour.”
So keep that kind of in the back of your minds as we’re going through what Chloe would become. So Gaby and her husband, Raymond, moved to Paris in 1945 just at the end of the war. And they quite quickly integrate themselves into both Surrealist and Communist circles of artists and writers and activists in Paris’ intellectual centre on the Left Bank. Her husband got quite involved in political circles in the Communist movement and would actually go on to establish his own modern art gallery. And while Gaby played a supportive role in his endeavours, she was not particularly involved in the day-to-day running of those activities and really sought out something of her own. Gaby did not need to work to support herself. Both her family’s money, as well as her husband’s, granted her some financial stability. So she sought out a venture that really allowed her the freedom to explore her own artistic and intellectual interests that were independent of her husband’s. Her turn to fashion is unsurprising given her interest in it from early on. But I have to say, despite the fact that she had this lifelong infatuation with French fashions, what Gaby found when she arrived in France in the post-war period was that the ready-made garments available to women in this post-war period were poorly constructed. The styles were promoted by haute couture salons and had this very overly constrictive approach to women’s body. She just was not finding what she thought a modern woman in this kind of new social order should be wearing.
The French fashion market in the immediate post-war period was very much dominated by the influence of a select number of designers part of the haute couture designation. So to be considered both a respectably dressed and fashionable woman, one really had to wear either very expensive and unique originals that were commissioned directly from the lead designer of an haute couture salon, or you had to have a copy made by a local seamstress that was inspired by these designs but made much more cheaply. Of course, the haute couture designer who had a very outsized influence on popular trends in this period was Christian Dior and his New Look from 1947, which really continued to dominate popular styles even into the 1950s with its bold and exaggerated silhouette. It was very much something that Gaby didn’t quite understand as being fit for purpose in the post-war period. This context in France at this moment is really of key importance to the early success of Gaby’s fashion venture. When she moves in 1945 to Paris from Cairo, women across France voted for the very first time. And there is this wave of post-war modernization that brought these vast political, economic, and cultural changes that set the stage for women in particular to step into new modes of living, with civic engagement and more economic opportunities. Keep in mind, though, that it was not until 1966 that French women could have a bank account that they opened on their own or work without their husband’s authorization.
So it’s really in this context that Gaby set out to create a new approach to fashion with designs that really negotiated the nuances of this developing modern identity. And I’ve included a quote here on the screen from Gaby. Thinking back to these early years, she says, “I started Chloe because I loved the idea of couture, but found the concept a little out of date- a little artificial. A thing of beauty and quality should be seen on women in the streets.” She is very much interested in dressing herself and her friends, those women of the Left Bank, like Simone de Beauvoir, who she saw as representative of what women would become in the ‘50s and '60s. Her first dresses were made in 1952, sewn actually in her own home, made of a cotton poplin fabric that she had selected. And once the dresses were made up, she sold them to Paris boutiques, the same boutiques where she hadn’t been able to find something that she, herself, desired, something that sat in between haute couture and ready-made. It had the luxurious, beautiful materials, but was perhaps more accessible in price point. In many ways, her designs were a reaction to the very rigid and overly structured hourglass silhouettes of Dior’s designs. And I include on the screen here an example of what this looks like. This hourglass silhouette had a very tightly-cinched waist. It had many, many yards of fabric, very tight and kind of rounded shoulders. It wasn’t something meant to be moved in and lived in in the way that she imagined.
And Gaby’s concept for Chloe was to really seamlessly join this high-quality production of the haute couture garments with the convenience of ready-to-wear, and do so in silhouettes that were unrestrained and unstructured, that gave this kind of youthful sense of femininity. She channelled her own preference for garments that were quite beautifully crafted and still allowed for easy movement. It didn’t have multiple heavy linings, as you can see the skirt of Dior’s New Look does, or for example, doesn’t require that you have a corset to create a particular silhouette under your garments. These are clothes that were very much inspired by what she remembered women of Alexandria’s sporting clubs wearing in her youth. So I think the thing that people often remark on is that Chloe is a brand started and not named after an individual. It’s not named after Gaby herself. And rather than use her own name, Gaby borrowed a friend’s for her new business. She preferred Chloe for what she saw as this kind of feminine roundness and typically French sound that very much encapsulated her hopes for what the brand would represent. And you’re seeing on the screen now an example of a dress from 1967 where you can see that Chloe label very prominently. This label is of particular importance to Gaby because, from the beginning, she really understood the importance of creating an image, an identity for her own brand.
So when she sold her designs to boutiques, she insisted that they keep the label with Chloe’s name in the garments, even though it was common practise at the time for boutiques to put their own label in the garment instead, and just really establish a reputation for herself independent of where the garments were being sold. So this particular garment you can see has the Chloe label at top, but it also has very prominently, also the addition of two labels from the Canadian retailer Holt Renfrew just below. So Gaby had many talents. She was a very bold entrepreneur and a businesswoman. She was a very impressive stylist and creative director. She had very spot-on instincts for branding and marketing. She was a great team builder. She knew how to nurture her staff. But I don’t think she would be shy in saying that sewing was not one of her strengths. Gaby played a really direct role in designing Chloe’s earliest garments, but her real strength was really in her vision for a new approach to dressing and in creating this very nurturing and supportive environment for other young designers that she would hand pick, select, and work with. So by 1959, Gaby had begun to work with several freelance designers, each of whom would submit several sketches of garments and ensembles that Gaby would then purchase and produce with her own very vital modifications and input. And Gaby always, always, always was the person to select the fabrics in which these garments would be made up from.
There is a very impressive contingent of designers that contributed designs for early collections of Chloe, and we’ll talk to them, kind of talk of them in just a bit. But this contingent of young, largely female designers that Chloe would create designs with Gaby that really embraced their own youthful effervescence. And when you see these images in the fashion press in particular, they really came to embody the kind of fashionable, sartorial expressions of the post-war, modern French woman. The dress you’re seeing on the screen now is one of the very few dresses we know to exist from the first 15 years of the brand. And even in this one example, you can see how Gaby’s designs drew from the functionality and ease of sportswear and very active movement, to foreground simplicity and comfort, rather than this kind of opulence and extravagance that was so popular amongst haute couture designs. This Chloe dress is one of the biggest successes from her early years in fashion. It’s called the Embrun, or Sea Spray, dress. It was made in collaboration between Gaby and the designer Maxime de la Falaise. The two of them wanted to create a day dress that was made from this wool jersey material, but took a form that resembled a shirt dress, something kind of from a menswear typology, but was still quite loose on the body. And Gaby wanted the collar to stand up and have very starched cuffs for a day dress that would be, you know, kind of comfortable and casual, but still have this kind of crisp elegance.
And the innovation here is that Gaby asked Maxime de la Falaise to use a twill fabric that was usually used for men’s ties and used that to line the cuffs and the collars so that the body of the dress can remain loose and soft, and yet, at the cuffs and the collars, you have this crisp finished look and a very stark finish. Not only was Gaby thinking about the ways in which women could dress themself and really offering something quite different, but she was rethinking the way that fashion could reach its target audience and consumers. And in a major departure from the precedent of haute couture salons, which unveiled their collection in these kind of hushed and private interiors, Chloe launched each of its seasonal lines in very lively public spaces. The first Chloe fashion shows, which you can see on the screen now, began at 9:30 in the morning. The first show was launched at Cafe de Flore, the Left Bank cafe, and guests were invited to have breakfast while models ambled between their tables. It was both an invite list and also open to anyone who happened to be having kind of coffee or pastries and breakfast at the time. Subsequent Chloe fashion shows were followed in the nearby Brasserie Lipp and the Clotherie de Leela.
And the model of this kind of cafe presentation is one that continued into the 1970s. It was a way of bringing the garments to the women that Gaby wanted to wear her clothes, rather than make it quite exclusionary and difficult to access the presentations. These cafes were, of course, frequented by the very type of women that Aghion wanted her clothes to reach, and I think also, this approach really expressed her desire to distance Chloe from tradition and instead modernise it, bringing to fashion a freshness and a vitality that really challenged the conformity of the preceding generation of couturiers and their very stronghold on fashion tastes. So as I mentioned, there are very few of Chloe’s earliest garments known to exist. Though we certainly hope that over the course of this project, more dresses that have survived until now may come to light. Maybe some of you have Chloe garments as well in your closets at home. But what we do know of these early works, we can understand through photographs of fashion shows, like the ones we just saw, publicity images, and coverage in the fashion press in magazines like “Elle” and “French Vogue.” And so I’ll just flip through very quickly a few of the images of Chloe that we see in the fashion press. What’s so interesting about these images is that the growing prominence of Chloe’s earliest years coincide with the growing prominence of this new type of fashion magazine in “Elle” magazine, the “Elle” reader. “Elle” magazine had been established in France in the same year that Gaby moved to Paris, in 1945, by the Russian-born Jewish journalist Helene Gordon-Lazareff.
She really wanted a magazine that spoke to the new civic engagement of French women at the time, and she wanted a magazine whose pages had a kind of generous dose of current affairs and literature, as well as fashion and home decor. “Elle’s” readership really spoke to this new aspirational identity for French women and one that Gaby’s vision for Chloe really paralleled. They both recognised the importance of this new young woman of a kind of persona in Chloe. And this young woman is one that, interestingly, in Chloe, we see several times. Chloe is actually pictured more than 500 times in the first 20 years of its existence alone in “Elle” magazine. So I’ll just show you a few of the images to get a sense of the early years of Chloe. An example from “Elle” in 1957, another example from 1956 juxtaposing Chloe designs with this very modern symbol of the automobile. This playsuit from “Elle” in 1957 that I love particularly because it reminds me so much of the image of Gaby that we know and love of her in her favourite place in the world, in Alexandria, in Egypt, a photograph taken by her husband. Other examples where Chloe is juxtaposed with these very modern architectural examples of steel and glass. Chloe shot by the photographer Peter Knapp in the Paris Metro, really showing how Chloe is meant to be worn out and about, but also, vitally as part of modern infrastructure of city living.
Another image of the Chloe kind of garments in this element of kind of bravery, perched up on this tall water tower. Some cheekier examples from “Vogue,” including a Chloe coat designed by Graziella Fontana for Chloe in which the Chloe dress is kind of pictured as a super girl alongside these comic book heroes. And while those examples are really quite lovely to look at, nothing really beats the dresses themselves. So we’ll jump back into the exhibition. And what you’re seeing on the screen now is both an example of the exhibition, so this is one of our first galleries in which we bring together a selection of hand-painted silk dresses from the 1960s. And this is the point in time in which Chloe has really been firmly established and in the public consciousness. And it’s well-positioned to address these shifting desires of a modern woman. Gaby continued in the 1960s to work with several freelance designers to create each collection. But in 1963, she hired the then unknown Karl Lagerfeld, and the two of them would go on to work closely for more than 25 years. Lagerfeld’s designs, which again, are all those you see on the screen now, really embraced this light, easygoing structure that Gaby had sought to create. And their collaboration resulted in a series of these very weightless dresses that Gaby’s concept of luxury ready-to-wear showed, which combines this exquisite handwork, these lush silk materials, with a very uncomplicated, modern silhouette.
These very unstuffy shapes were the perfect canvas for the very colourful patterns that Lagerfeld developed from a range of artistic sources. He drew references from Cubist paintings, from prints from Russian Constructivism, from Art Deco, from Art Nouveau, and even from 1960s psychedelic rock posters. So the left again is an installation image from our exhibition featuring many examples of these hand-painted dresses. And the dress that you see on the right is one of the motifs that are inspired by the lyrical drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. The dress is called the Astoria dress. So what do I mean by hand-painted silk? Well, Lagerfeld would often paste reference images directly onto his sketches as a kind of instruction for Chloe’s workshop to then interpret on silk. Silk was Aghion’s favourite fabric, and thus, is Chloe’s most frequently used textile. Between 1960 and 1970s, a woman named Nicole Lefort managed a small Parisian studio that was tasked with hand-painting these asymmetrical patterns onto Chloe’s silk dresses, what she called the picture dresses. So Nicole Lefort’s studio would work from Lagerfeld’s notes and sketches and translate these designs that he had found, often in art books, onto a dress themselves. So these hand-painted motifs were then adapted, painted onto the pattern pieces before then each of those patterns were sewn up into a dress. So the motif that you see on the dress on the left, for example, was adapted from a Cubist painting by Albert Gleizes. And you can see the dress on the right takes its name from the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff and also in its form references Russian Constructivism.
By the end of the 1960s and particularly after the events of May 1968, the kind of disillusionment with the ideals of the post-war period were very much shifting the ways in which femininity was displayed and constructed and understood. This kind of post-war disillusionment is captured very poignantly in Bunuel’s Surrealist film from 1972, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” in which the main character, played by Stephane Audran, is actually costumed by Chloe. Audran’s character is meant to typify the very buoyant attitudes of the post-war context, and yet, she finds herself in these kind of nightmarish and absurd situations, often underscoring the vanity of her position. And the film received quite critical acclaim in both France and the US, winning the Academy Award, for example. And what’s so interesting, I think, about this is that Bunuel is keenly aware of fashion’s ability to disseminate these visual signifiers of identity and use fashion to really reveal nuances of a fictional character. And thus, his choice of Chloe’s designs for the film really draw on the idea of a modern woman that Chloe had been understood in popular imagination to add something and augment our understanding of these characters throughout the movie. Shortly after the release of Bunuel’s film, Lagerfeld actually became Chloe’s sole designer.
So I mentioned that, in Chloe’s earliest years, Gaby was working with several designers to collaborate together. But just after this, Lagerfeld becomes the only designer. And his vision for Chloe, alongside Gaby’s, really comes to the foreground. Interestingly too, Lagerfeld really becomes very much the face of the brand. On the right-hand side, you can see an editorial image featuring Chloe’s designs shot by the French photographer Guy Bourdin for “Paris Vogue” in 1977. Bourdin actually staged this photograph in Lagerfeld’s own Paris apartment. It has this kind of air of Surrealism and this ominous tone, which is quite typical of Bourdin’s style. But to have Lagerfeld’s own presence in this film be so evocative is quite noteworthy. Chloe’s ingenuity has really been in its ability to consistently reinvent itself and reflect the needs and tastes and desires of modern women. You saw just in the previous slide how this was starting to shift in the 1960s and '70s. And this flexibility has really been a hallmark of Chloe’s ability to consistently hit this right note of relevance and nostalgia. I’m reminded of the variety of aesthetics and styles that Chloe has presented over the years that very much keep in tune with shifting tastes, but suits the kind of mood of the moment, hence the title of our show. Each era of Chloe, which you’re seeing, you know, a range of on the screen now, has really ushered in new styles and approaches and aesthetics, while maintaining Gaby’s original spirit and ethos for the brand, one that was quite free-spirited, lighthearted, sometimes playful, and witty. And in the 1980s, there is really now a new era for Chloe that is moving away from this bohemian spirit of the previous years towards this very bold and audacious form of dressing. It’s in keeping with this powerful new vision of femininity that’s emerging at the time.
It’s in this period that you see a profusion of very intricate finishings and beadwork in Chloe’s designs. There is also an incredible series of structured and body-contouring black dresses that play with sparkle and these kind of trompe-l'oeil motifs. For example, dresses that are imitating a 17th century violin or water gushing from a faucet. Or in the case of the dress that you can see on the right, embroidery that creates a dress hanging on a dress on the body. These fashions were very self-referential in this kind of Postmodernist spirit and played with parody and this kind of historicist pastiche. And at the turn of the millennium now, kind of fast forwarding a little bit, Chloe took a chance on a then unknown designer, Stella McCartney, who at the age of 25, was given her first big job in fashion. And when McCartney starts at Chloe, I’m sure it will surprise you all none at all to hear that many journalists and the fashion press were quite sceptical of her ability to make a big impact in Chloe. And she very quickly proved them all very, very wrong. She brought this very British sense of confidence and provocation to her celebration of female empowerment at the brand. And she really thought of herself as the typical Chloe client in the way that Gaby did. McCartney would say, “They’re just lovely clothes that I and my friends would want to wear.” I think McCartney had a very intimate experience of Chloe as well, and part of that intimate experience gave her a kind of plethora of knowledge to work with in thinking just how to create new designs for a new generation of women.
McCartney talks about how much of her time as a young woman was spent playing in her mother’s closet and wearing original Chloe garments from the 1970s. And that very deep understanding of the brand’s history gave her a bit of a leg up in refashioning and rethinking how the brand might respond to a kind of wave of third-wave feminism. You can see the shirt on the right, this kind of cheeky, faintly risque image of two bunches of bananas wrapping around the wearer’s breasts has this kind of provocative riposte on the back. So what you’re seeing is the front and back of the shirt. And the back says, “Keep your bananas off my melons.” Both McCartney and her assistant, Phoebe Philo, who would later become the lead designer, often incorporated this fruit imagery into the graphic T-shirts that they designed for Chloe as a kind of kittenish element of pop culture, but also used these as kind of symbolic imageries that addressed their own younger generation of women. And you’re seeing in the installation image now a gallery in which all of the young women British designers who would come to work at Chloe in the late '90s and early 2000s have used their own experience to shape the tastes and aesthetics of the brand. So I mentioned Phoebe Philo was Stella McCartney’s assistant. When Stella McCartney leaves, Phoebe Philo becomes the lead designer of Chloe.
When Phoebe Philo then goes on to leave, her assistant at the time, Hannah MacGibbon, would then be promoted to be lead designer. And you have a fourth in this kind of legacy of British women in Claire Waight Keller, who would come to the brand in 2011. These creative directors have really found their own way to revive and reinterpret Chloe’s very bohemian styles, probing at these aesthetics of femininity while fostering this spirit of sisterhood. They often played with this dichotomy of feminine and masculine, juxtaposing very airy fabrics with sharp tailoring. And instead of making sketches, many of these designers would often work in this very hands-on design approach that included fitting sessions, really aiming to make clothes that they would wear themself. And here on the screen now, you can see Hannah MacGibbon, when she was Phoebe Philo’s assistant, trying on a pleated leather skirt over her jeans, really breaking this boundary between the designer and the wearer. Of course, each of these designers had quite a, I would say, entourage of celebrity friends as well. Gwyneth Paltrow and Cameron Diaz, for example, were avid and well-documented Chloe lovers and add to this kind of cult and love around Chloe as representing this very young and effervescent, exciting, successful woman. Chloe’s recent creative directors, when we opened the show, these were the two latest creative directors. And now, of course, later this week, Chemena Kamali will present her first show for Chloe as the new creative director. But Natacha Ramsay-Levi and Gabriela Hearst, who were the designers between 2017 and 2023, both reflect on the cycles of fashion and return to past styles in a way that really explore the richness of the brand’s heritage that we have been looking at today.
Natacha Ramsay-Levi, for example, really defines her approach as vintage in the future. She brings this kind of spirit of mix and match to her work, in which she’s plucking and studying garments from Chloe’s own history and reviving some of those iconic patterns, while then incorporating new designs of her own. So you’ll see the blue dress in the centre, for example, includes a re-addition of Lagerfeld’s 1973 blue and black, very geometric motif that she has then added herself this sportswear-inspired stripe to the arm and a miniskirt at the bottom. She’s also referencing Stella McCartney’s horses and horse motifs. She is also, I think, importantly, in her collections, often collaborating with other artists, such as Rita Ackermann, really highlighting the creative powers of women across disciplines. You can see an example from that collaboration on the right. Gabriela Hearst, in her turn, really brought forward Chloe’s bohemian '70s spirit, bringing back this maxi dress, these long, kind of oversized and earthy colours, but also revived the environmentalist ethos of that decade. She forged a number of partnerships with artisans to bring this kind of handcrafted savoir-faire of Chloe’s early years back to prominence and also importantly committed Chloe to sustainable fashion practises. She is an advocate of upcycling and literally brings back these textiles from the past by incorporating dead stock fabrics into new designs. So this fringed dress you see on the right was crafted using dead stock crepe de chine ribbons that were found in Chloe’s workshop. They were then knotted together in this macrame technique, so creating an entirely new dress without any new materials.
So just to say a final word as we wrap up here today. I’m showing you the last image of the last gallery in our exhibition, which was Choghakate’s way of paying homage to Gaby Aghion. We’re looking on the right at a beautiful image of Gaby in her favourite place, the Egyptian desert. And these colours of the Egyptian sand really spoke to the palette that Chloe would bring to its kind of public and designs over the course of 70 years. So this final room in the exhibition brings the Chloe blouse, a very humble object, and pulls examples from across the brand’s history in these very sandy, warm tones, evocative of the Egyptian sands. For me, I think it’s important to recognise that the notoriety of the designers that Gaby hired to work at Chloe have often eclipsed her own notoriety. But in many ways, we know the names of Stella McCartney and Phoebe Philo and Karl Lagerfeld because of Gaby’s foundational role in building a fashion brand that facilitated and supported the talents and careers of young designers. Until now, very little attention has been paid to the pivotal role that she played in forming and developing an important part of fashion. But I do hope this exhibition is just one in the first line of many projects on her legacy to come. It’s been a real pleasure sharing the exhibition with you all today, but I think, as there are so many of you, I’m sure there are questions and things that we haven’t been able to touch on. So I will stop screen sharing, and if there are questions that either Claudia or I can answer, we will be very happy for them.
Q&A and Comments:
Q - [Host] Thank you so much, Kristina. We have quite a few questions on Egypt particularly. We have some questions about how old she was when she left Egypt, Gaby, that is, and why she moved.
A - Gaby was 24 when she moved from Egypt to Paris. She was newly married, and I think very happy to move with her husband to what they saw as really the seat and origin point of intellectual movements, like Communism, but also Surrealist art movements, that had been so influential for her formation in her early years.
Q - [Host] Thank you. And we’re getting some questions about what is known about what Gaby and her family went through during World War II and if she experienced any anti-Semitism there.
A - Gaby was living in Egypt throughout the war. She moved from Alexandria to Cairo, which she says was for her husband’s health. He had respiratory issues, and she says the air in Cairo was a bit better. But she doesn’t talk really at all in terms of particular anti-Semitic incidences in which she felt attacked or uncomfortable in any way. I do know that when she moves to Paris, she is moving in circles with very supportive friends and family as well. Her brother was living in France, and many of her circle were also Egyptian Jewish emigres to France.
Q - [Host] Thank you. Someone’s asking: “How did the Chloe brand deal with the copyright issues in painting or copying some of the designs onto silk?”
A - I think because they were translated, they’re not direct copies. They’re something that was really an inspiration from those designs, and they had gone through so many translation processes that they really were seen as kind of inspired by, rather than meant to be a direct copy of. I cannot speak to particular copyright law in France of the 1960s, but I’m sure there is someone out there that can and perhaps could give a bit more context to what those kinds of issues might be.
Q - [Host] Thank you. We’re getting some questions on if you can expound a little bit more on her personal life, whether she had children, was married, that kind of thing.
A - She does. Claudia maybe can speak to Philippe Aghion, Gaby’s dear son, who is actually coming to visit us very, very soon. He is a very well-respected economist in his own right. And his daughter Mikhaela is also a really lovely kind of ambassador of her grandmother’s legacy, really embodying much of Gaby’s spirit and remains involved in the Chloe brand today.
Q - [Host] Wonderful, thank you. Someone’s asking if you could clarify if Gaby did the earliest designs for the brand herself.
A - She did. The earliest designs were done by her. But as I said, I don’t think she thought of herself as a particularly great seamstress. But she did know how to cultivate and work with other designers. So what started as her own designs shifted into collaborations, which then transformed into designs that she really allowed the designers she hired to run with. But she was always very instrumental in providing key adjustments and changes. There’s so many beautiful pictures of the Chloe studios in which you always see Gaby in the background working, sitting at the table, right at the seat of the action.
Q - [Host] Thank you. And we’re getting a question: “Who or what inspired her?”
A - I do think that Egypt really remained a very key inspiration throughout her life, not only in the ways in which the women around her in Alexandria in the '20s, '30s, and '40s were dressing, but also in its kind of memories for her. She talks so much about how the Egyptian desert remained such a core part of how she saw colour and why she loved silk. So you really see those influences continue in the colour palette of Chloe and also in the forms of dressing that she promoted at the brand.
Q - [Host] Thank you. Someone is asking how Gaby’s designs compared to that of another Jewish designer, Sonia Rykiel.
A - Sonia, a great, great designer. Someone who is often credited as being the originator of ready-to-wear. And I will say that Gaby was about 10 years ahead of her. But two incredible women who really saw a new generation of young people who needed a form of dressing that was not currently available to them. I love Sonia Rykiel’s designs. Hers are very kind of buoyant and bold and audacious, quite cheeky, but as with Chloe’s, they shift and change over time and really speak to the needs and tastes of women season to season.
Q - [Host] Thank you. Someone’s asking: “Even though it’s not haute couture, weren’t the prices still a little too high for the average woman?”
A - Claudia’s nodding, they were. They really were quite expensive. You know, something like those hand-painted silk dresses, for example, were made in numbers between, you know, 35 and 120, so it is still relatively exclusive. And certainly, the prices matched that.
Q - So it’s true. These clothes were still very expensive. You know, she catered to her friends and to herself, let’s just say that. And no more expensive than having a knock-off of a Dior dress or anything else like that. But Kristina, I forgot if you mentioned, I know you talked about her marketing skills, but in the shop, how she took the label. Did you mention that?
A - Yeah, really insisting that her label be kept in, rather than a retailer trying to take credit for something that she had made.
So you know, typically in the shops then, a retailer would cut out all the labels and put their own label in. I even remember growing up and going into shops with my mother and the label of the, you know, of the shop was in there. And she just insisted, you know, part of marketing and getting the Chloe out, that brand, that name. But you know, the clothes were not inexpensive. They were still, you know, expensive ready-to-wear.
Yeah.
So it was not for the everyday person.
No, it was definitely-
Let’s just say that.
An aspirational everyday, we can say.
Yeah, aspirational.
May I ask a quick question? May I ask a question? What about the shoes?
I can’t really answer that question. You mean in terms of the shoes being…
'Cause Phoebe, Phoebe’s great shoe design.
Oh.
Were the other designers also studying the-
You know, Phoebe did have some, you know, is a great shoe designer, and I think that she knocked it out of the park with her shoes and you know, the bags, which, you know, became the it bags.
Yeah.
And so it really-
Yeah.
You know, that put Chloe in, I will never forget, just, you know, everyone wanting a Chloe bag. They were always sold out. You could never get them at Barneys. They were really unaffordable for me, and it was the first time you actually saw a bag being, it’s when the bag started becoming really expensive. You think about Loewe and all these other, you know, the bags were just out of the park in terms of ready-to-wear. And she was the, you know, Chloe, Phoebe was the person who really started that. And it was inching a little bit with Stella as well, and then Phoebe, of course, they worked together, and then Phoebe took over on that. Yes, her leather goods and her shoes are still, you know, very sought-after and collectibles, as we know, Wendy, collectibles.
Yeah, and tell me, the new young designer, do you think that she’s going to hit it out of the park as well?
Well, I-
Not Stella, I might say.
So Chemena Kamali worked at Chloe. Chemena Kamali is the new designer whose collection we are all very eagerly awaiting to see. She worked at Chloe under Claire Waight Keller, so she has quite an intimate understanding of the brand and its history as well. So I think there are very high hopes for her. Personally, I have very high hopes for her.
Okay, brilliant, so to be watched. And maybe just-
One to watch, yes.
Yeah, one to watch. I just want to say thanks a million for a brilliant. Is the exhibition still on?
Yes, 'til February 18th.
[Wendy] Okay, well, I just wanted to say to everybody who ever has the opportunity, go and see it, tell your friends. It is really-
Thank you, everyone, for having us.
Thanks, Laura. Thanks, Laura. Thank you, thank you, ladies.