The Chemena Kamali Chloé collection at the centre of 10 Magazine‘s Issue 77 began, as so many of the better things in fashion do, with a feeling rather than a brief. ‘It started with a feeling, and it was a reflection of what’s going on,’ Kamali said of the work, a folksy, hand-craft-saturated collection built around two ideas: freedom, and a sense of shared humanity.
The Moodboard Behind the Chemena Kamali Chloé Collection
The references Kamali assembled are worth sitting with. Elaine Constantine’s colour-saturated, optimistic imagery sits alongside the documentary work of Bob Fitch, who spent years recording hippie culture and its values. What unites them is not nostalgia, exactly, but something more alive: an uninhibited, outdoorsy playfulness, a joy that has not been styled out of itself. These are not images of fashion as aspiration. They are images of people being, freely, themselves.
That tension, between the constructed world of a luxury house and the radical informality of the references, is precisely what makes the collection interesting. Traditional hand craft runs through it, the kind of detail that rewards proximity and repays wear. The pieces do not announce themselves; they accrue.
Shot by Vanina Sorrenti and styled by Sophia Neophitou, the story appears on the cover of Issue 77, with Linda Bubkamp wearing the collection. The issue, themed FUTURE, LEGACY, HERITAGE, landed on newsstands 18 September. The full cast: models Laura Savy and Dexter Franc alongside Bubkamp; hair by Hiroshi Matsushita using Oribe Hair Care; make-up by Megumi Matsuno at Of Substance using Sisley Paris; manicure by Sasha Goddard at Caren Agency using the Dior Manicure Collection.
A House With Its Own Deep Grammar
Legacy is not an incidental theme for Chloé. Mastermind notes that Gaby Aghion founded the house in 1952, and the particular kind of femininity she established, one that was at ease rather than armoured, has been the house’s recurring argument across seven decades. Vanity Fair records that Karl Lagerfeld shaped its identity from the 1960s through the 1980s, and again in the 1990s, alongside Aghion herself, building out the vocabulary that successive designers have variously honoured and contested.
Kamali arrived at the house in late 2023, according to Vanity Fair, stepping into a role that carries all of that accumulated history. Her instinct, from what this collection suggests, is not to annotate that history but to return to its emotional root: the woman who dresses for herself, on her own terms, in clothes that feel rather than perform.
There is, too, something quietly personal in how Kamali approaches the work. Vogue has reported that she was named after Doña Jimena, a character played by Sophia Loren in the 1961 film El Cid. Whether or not one reads that into the collection’s sense of romantic, unfussy womanhood, it is the kind of biographical detail that reframes a designer’s instincts. The folk references, the craft, the warmth: they do not feel borrowed.
The Chemena Kamali Chloé collection, as seen in Issue 77, makes the case that the house’s most durable ideas, ease, craft, a particular quality of light-handedness, are not period pieces. They are, as Kamali herself suggests, a reflection of what is going on: a collective appetite for clothes that feel human, made with care, and worn with the kind of freedom that cannot be trend-cycled into existence.
10 Magazine Issue 77 is on newsstands now.
