Ahead of her big runway reveal on Feb. 29 during Paris Fashion Week, Chloé’s new creative director Chemena Kamali is releasing a series of portraits of iconic women from different eras of the maison.
They include Jerry Hall, Jessica Miller, Natalia Vodianova and Liya Kebede, many of them pictured with the Eiffel Tower and Paris rooftops looming behind them.
The still campaign, lensed by photographer David Sims, plus a film by Frank Lebon, are to be released later Monday on Chloé‘s digital channels.
“I wanted to capture the emotion and energy of Chloé and the women who embody both its history and spirit,” said Kamali, revealing the images and the concept exclusively to WWD. “They are effortlessly powerful, beautiful, free.”
Hall and company are joined by a “new generation of Chloé women” including FeiFei Sun, Ornella Umutoni and Kristine Lindseth.
The portraits – featuring windblown hair, direct gazes and upturned chins – telegraph confidence, natural beauty and the dreamy femininity long associated with the Paris house, founded by Gaby Aghion in 1952.
All the models wear looks from Kamali’s pre-fall collection, which was shown to buyers last December under the utmost secrecy, and suggest a return to floaty fabrics, looser silhouettes and a powdery palette.
The images also feature Chloé’s new logo in a serif font inspired by the original from the ’70s, when designer Karl Lagerfeld propelled the house to prominence.
The tweaked logo was recently revealed on the maison’s Instagram account, which was wiped clean and is now being populated by Kamali, who wrote that no she plans to build “on the vision that Gaby Aghion and Karl Lagerfeld defined early in the maison’s history.”
Lagerfeld’s incomparable fashion career included two stints at Chloé – from 1974 to 1983, and from 1992 to 1997.
The maison’s latest Instagram post flashes images of a young Lagerfeld and his famously frothy, lighthearted creations, along with runway snippets from other chapters of the brand, which has been designed by a succession of mostly female designers.
Born in Germany in 1981, Kamali studied fashion design at the Trier University of Applied Sciences and then graduated from Central Saint Martins, a constituent college of the University of the Arts in London, in 2007, beginning her career at Chloé as part of Phoebe Philo’s team.
She rejoined Chloé in 2012 as design director under Clare Waight Keller until 2016, when she departed to become Saint Laurent’s women’s ready-to-wear design director under Anthony Vaccarello.
Her résumé also includes stints at Alberta Ferretti and Strenesse. She also recently consulted for Los Angeles-based contemporary brand Frame.
As creative director of the new “Chloé portraits,” Kamali conscripted Ashley Brokaw for casting, Lotta Volkova for styling, Damien Boissinot for hair, and Lucia Pieroni for makeup.
Sims lensed Chloé campaigns under two previous creative directors: Hannah MacGibbon and Natacha Ramsay-Levi.
