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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, and almost 500 in her house alone.
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… and so on.
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