The Queen of the Blouse

New York Times

06-03-2025

On the second floor of a 19th-century villa near the Bois de Boulogne, overlooking a garden housing a child's trampoline and various plastic scooters, there is a room filled with blouses. Hundreds of blouses.
Lace blouses from the Victorian era and big-shouldered blouses from the 1980s. Blouses in paisley and leopard print. Blouses with familiar pedigrees — Ungaro, Yves Saint Laurent, Giorgio di Sant' Angelo — and blouses with no pedigree at all. A rainbow of blouses arranged according to color on six clothing racks.
Welcome to the mind — or, rather, the home office — of Chemena Kamali, the creative director of Chloé.
If you want to understand how, in only two seasons, she transformed Chloé from an earnest but increasingly minor women's wear house into one of fashion's hottest labels, not to mention the uniform of cool girls like Suki Waterhouse and Sienna Miller (and, during her run for president, Kamala Harris), you have to understand Ms. Kamali's obsession with the blouse.
She has been collecting them for 25 years and has more than 1,500 blouses: at her parents' home in Germany, in storage in France, almost 500 in her house alone. For her, the blouse — that relatively unappreciated top, redolent of school uniforms, Edwardian nannies and 1970s career girls that lost its primacy of place in the woman's wardrobe to the T-shirt decades ago — is actually the Platonic ideal of a garment.
'The evolution of the blouse is the evolution of femininity in a way, and the evolution of fashion,' Ms. Kamali said recently, tucked into one of the two giant leather chairs in her office. Aside from the blouses, a big modular desk from the 1980s and some pottery and family tchotchkes are the only objects in the room. She and her husband, Konstantin Wehrum, and their two sons, ages 3 and 5, moved into the house when she got the job at Chloé last year — they had been on their way to California — and she has not had a lot of time to unpack.
'Historically, the blouse was a man's undergarment,' she said. When she talks about something she loves, you can hear her working through her ideas in real time: 'Then, in Victorian times, the blouse became feminized. Postwar, it got more tailored. In the 1970s, again, more fluid, and in the '80s, more powerful. It can be formal and strict or playful and romantic. It reflects personalities. It reflects all of the things that make us who we are as women.'
That's a lot of meaning to load onto a garment, but to Ms. Kamali, the blouse is not just a bit of fabric with buttons.
The Shirt on Her Back
No one wears a blouse better than Ms. Kamali, not even converts like Karlie Kloss and Liya Kebede, who have begun to line the Chloé front rows in her lacy tops and wooden platforms. Ms. Kamali's typical uniform starts with a Chloé blouse of her own design or one from her collection, often in an aged ivory with a touch of embroidery to lend it a vaguely bohemian air.
'A blouse is so much easier than a dress,' she said.
She pairs them with high-waist Chloé jeans, shredded at the hem, white Chloé high-top sneakers and a tangle of necklaces, some new, some sourced at the same vintage markets where she finds her blouses. With waist-length brown hair parted in the center and framing a face that seems makeup free, it creates a vibe that is both Venice Beach hippie — even though Ms. Kamali grew up mostly in Dortmund, Germany — and efficient. If Stevie Nicks had a day job at a venture capital fund, she might look like this.
'She's aspirational,' said the actress Rashida Jones, who met Ms. Kamali a year ago. 'But it doesn't feel unattainable. It feels grounded.'
Kaia Gerber, who has modeled for Ms. Kamali and wears her clothes off the runway, put it this way: 'Chemena herself is a testament to holding your power without having to adhere to the judgments society makes about women based on the way they dress.'
Ms. Kamali, 43, started collecting blouses in 2003, which was around the time she got her first job at Chloé. She knew she wanted to be a designer when she was a child, and in Germany, she said, that meant being like Karl Lagerfeld, the most famous German designer, who was then at Chloé. She went to the University of Applied Sciences in Trier, Germany, and talked her way into Chloé as an intern during the Phoebe Philo era.
'The first designer piece I ever bought, actually, was at the company's employee sale for 50 euros,' she said, pointing to a white T-shirt with a 'necklace' of silver teardrops woven into the front. 'That's when my vintage obsession started, because I remember members of the team coming back from trips with big duffel bags and unpacking treasures they'd found. I realized how certain source pieces can trigger a creative process that can flow into the concept of a collection.'
She got a degree from Central Saint Martins, worked at Alberta Ferretti; Chloé again, under Clare Waight Keller; and then Saint Laurent before returning to Chloé in the top job. But wherever she went, Ms. Kamali kept buying blouses. She does not buy, as many collectors do, for historic or material value but rather according to details that catch her eye — 'the volume or the construction of the sleeve or yoke.'
As a result, her pieces are not forbiddingly expensive. They range from 'super cheap to maybe $700,' she said, though the average is about $300. She sources them from eBay, vintage fairs like A Current Affair in Los Angeles and what has turned into an extended network of vintage dealers.
'You go to a store, you go to a market and you meet this person who says, 'OK, you want more of this, I have some stuff in my basement,'' she said. 'Then, connecting to this community, this group of obsessive people all about the rare find, becomes an addiction.' It also made her perfect for Chloé.
All Blouses All the Time
The blouse is such an important part of the Chloé aesthetic that when the Jewish Museum in New York held the first major retrospective devoted to Chloé in 2023, it dedicated an entire room to the blouse. As a garment, it encapsulates the easy-breezy-feminine tone set by the founder, Gaby Aghion, in 1952, and was replicated to varying extents by the designers who came after, including Mr. Lagerfeld, Stella McCartney, Ms. Keller and Gabriela Hearst.
But while they all made blouses, none made them as central to their aesthetic as Ms. Kamali had. It is the way 'she connects to the fundamental values of the house,' said Philippe Fortunato, the chief executive of the fashion and accessories maisons at Richemont, the Swiss conglomerate that owns Chloe.
Indeed, Ms. Kamali's first collection for Chloé was built around a blouse. Specifically, a piece Karl Lagerfeld designed for Chloé with a black capelet of sorts built into the top. The blouse, she said, got her 'thinking about how the cape is an iconic piece in Chloé's history.'
Just as the lace in a Victorian blouse had inspired the lacy tiers of the last collection, which were visible not just in actual blouses, but also in playsuits with the affect of blouses and dresses that looked like longer versions of the blouses.
And just as, for her third collection, to be unveiled March 6, Ms. Kamali was thinking about something Karl Lagerfeld once said about 'the basic idea being the simplest of all: a blouse and a skirt.'
'That kind of triggered in me the idea of really looking at the blouse not as a component of a look, but as the main component,' she said. That in turn led her to the idea of the blouse as a container of historical fragments: a dolman sleeve, say, or an exaggerated collar or shoulder. All of which made their way into the collection.
'It's not about copying,' she said. 'It's about using the blouse as a way to root things in the past or in tradition.' And signal that it has a place in the future.
And as Lauren Santo Domingo, a founder of Moda Operandi, reports, it's working. Chloé is 'one of our fastest sellout designers,' Ms. Santo Domingo said, noting that sales of Chloé tops had grown 138 percent since Ms. Kamali's first collections appeared.
For the photographer David Sims, who shoots the Chloé campaigns, Ms. Kamali has essentially created 'the representation of a new French kind of woman, with a play around nudity and embroidery that suggests ownership over a sexual energy and power that feels like an answer to so many of the questions that have sprung up recently.' Questions about gender and stereotype; questions about the male gaze. Doing that through the prism of a garment that was essentially relegated to the dustbin of fashion and old rock stars is, he said, kind of 'radical.'
But that tension is actually the point of Ms. Kamali's Chloé, which has taken the Chloé girl and grown her into a woman.
'The term 'Chloé girl' is so connected to how the world perceived the house in the first place,' Ms. Kamali said. 'But the word 'girl' is reductive. I never want the Chloé woman to be only one thing. No woman is. She has shifting moods and feelings. Ease and optimism always exists with tension. These contrasts and these opposites are what makes everything interesting.'
Including, maybe especially, the shirt on your back.