We speak to Chloé’s creative director Natacha Ramsay-levi

Chloé’s creative director, Natacha Ramsay-levi, harbours a deep love of history but she’s not afraid to shake up the future

Natacha Ramsay-levi wanted to be a historian. She remembers marching against racism through the streets of Paris with her journalist father in the Eighties and how that experience led her to study African history and colonialism later in college to better understand the context of what she was fighting for. “I’ve always believed the best way to evolve is to learn from our past,” she says, her thick French accent piercing through the phone. “To me, there’s always been a link between history and fashion.” The first thing Ramsay-levi did when she was appointed creative director of Chloé in 2017—after 15 years as the protégé of Louis Vuitton artistic director of women’s collections Nicolas Ghesquière—was to excavate. Today she is credited for her intellectual, boyish take on Chloé’s bohemian roots, successfully filling the shoes of her formidable predecessors, including Stella Mccartney, Phoebe Philo and Clare Waight Keller. But first, Ramsay-levi dug deep into the label’s roots, discovering the history of its founder, designer Gaby Aghion, who became one of the pioneers of ready-to-wear in the 1950s, when luxury houses were still primarily producing haute couture. Avant-garde and progressive, Aghion became the North Star for the 40-year-old Ramsay-levi, guiding her as she crafted her own voice for the house. “Growing up, my family saw fashion as something elitist, related to advertising and consumerism, not art,” she says. “So when I joined fashion, I wanted it to be about something that mattered, to open a discussion.” The last three years have seen Ramsay-levi tackling various facets of feminism, beginning with her debut spring-summer 2018 collection, in which she translated her fascination for the Seventies—“an era of freedom when women’s clothing exploded across masculine lines and women were empowered to redefine their look”—into velvet, horse-print suits and ethereal boho dresses. Her latest fall-winter 2020 collection draws from the Hellenistic and Roman periods, when “gods were goddesses and humans were paying tribute to women”, says Ramsay-levi. “That’s a time I want to be in now.” The designer enlisted three female artists to help illustrate her vision. The first, French sculptor and artist Marion Verboom, created gold, totemic plinths etched with various patterns that dotted the runway at the Chloé show in Paris in February, where models in Katharine Hepburn-style frocks and trouser suits sashayed in between. “Marion works in a similar way to me: she digs through different periods in time and makes collages of them through her work,” says Ramsay-levi. “My silhouettes are also a collage of all my references, and what I love about this approach is you can parse each element or see the piece as a beautiful whole.” One reference came from American artist Rita Ackermann, Ramsay-levi’s second collaborator, whose sketches of colourful, abstract female forms were printed on billowing blouses. A quick swipe through Ramsaylevi’s Instagram page offers a