IS THIS THE COOLEST WOMAN IN FASHION?
EVERYONE WANTS to BE A ‘CHLOE` GIRL’, especially NOW NATACHA RAMSAY-LEVI IS at THE HELM. LOU STOPPARD meets THE WOMAN BEHIND the BRAND, WHOSE STYLE and MYSTIQUE IS AS COVETABLE AS the CLOTHES SHE CREATES
Natacha Ramsay-Levi is quietly reinventing Chloé for a new era
As I sit waiting for Natacha Ramsay-Levi, creative director of Chloé, in her Paris office, a distant jangling sound echoes through the corridors. Gradually, it gets louder and louder. ‘You can hear her coming,’ says an employee, just before Ramsay-Levi appears, decorated with clunky gold bangles and rings. It’s a sweltering day in Paris, but she looks cool, polished and remarkably unflustered. Her appointment in 2O17 was a surprise to some. The house, founded by Gaby Aghion in 1952, is known for epitomising a cheerful bohemianism. ‘Airy,’ Ramsay-Levi puts it. She came from Louis Vuitton, where she served as Nicolas Ghesquière’s design director. The two are close; she also followed him to Vuitton from Balenciaga, where she had worked since 2OO2. Ghesquière is celebrated as one of fashion’s tireless forward-thinkers – his collections are deliciously odd and often angular, merging historical costume with sci-fi elements. Chloé is less about fashion with a capital F.
‘It’s a brand that is a bit outside of fashion. It’s between fashion and lifestyle,’ says Ramsay-Levi, 39, in a strong French accent, gesturing in a manner that is so European, it seems like she’s performing. It’s a house close to the heart of French women, she explains. Before she turned to fashion, Ramsay-Levi was a history student: ‘I didn’t know Comme des Garçons. But I knew Chloé.’
The history of Chloé unites some of fashion’s best-loved stars – the late Karl Lagerfeld was creative director there twice, from 1963 to 1983, and later between 1992 and 1997. So too was Phoebe Philo, who took over from Stella McCartney in 2OO1, staying until 2OO6. Ramsay-Levi likes giving little ‘winks’ to the past in her collections – it’s natural as a former history scholar, she explains. When she arrived, the brief given was ‘evolution, not revolution’. ‘Small steps, small steps,’ she says.
Ramsay- Levi’s appointment came at a time when fashion embraced the behind-the-scenes grafter. Her pragmatic approach to the Chloé brief speaks of her understanding of how big houses, and the fashion system, work. Two years before her appointment, Gucci named then-unknown Alessandro Michele, who had worked at the house for 12 years, as creative director. ‘I think it came at a moment when CEOs and headhunters realised, We need someone who already knows the job. We know what a delay is, we know what a budget is. Our job now is so much about management – of the studio team, the commercial team, the communication team,’ she says.
Her old boss, Ghesquière, regularly sits on the front row at her shows and is an important mentor. ‘I’ll call Nicolas and I’ll say, “I need to see you. I have so many questions.”’ She’s also close to Julien Dossena, the creative director at neighbouring house Paco Rabanne. ‘The job is very emotional. It’s under my skin, it spreads everywhere. After all of that, a social life is nearly impossible – you are so mentally tired,’ she says. The support of
fellow designers also suggests a new moment in fashion: competition has been replaced with compassion and collaboration. ‘It’s not about killing ourselves,’ she says, recalling a time where a public meltdown, or something worse, felt like the inevitable end of a high-profile tenure at a fashion house.
Clothes are changing, too. Recently, in the wake of #MeToo, many brands have fallen over themselves to suggest that they are making smart clothes for smart women, working clothes for working women – feminist clothes, of course. Chloé, by contrast, has stuck fast to its cheerful tag of ‘Chloé Girls’ – using it liberally as a hashtag on Instagram. As other brands toughen up, Chloé has stayed light. It’s not edgy or zeitgesty; there are few logos. How does Ramsay-Levi unite her more eclectic sensibility with such a house? ‘I’m searching,’ she says, epitomising the Chloé woman in frayed black trousers, barely there sandals and a sleeveless paisley tunic from her SS19 collection. ‘One of the first things I was told when I arrived was, “We have the Chloé Girls, but we don’t know who they are; they don’t have depth.” I thought, Great, I’d love to do that. Her work in fleshing out the personality of the Chloé Girl has involved introducing more diverse references, or slightly more nuanced influences. Her last show, though decidedly boho, was about ‘the witch, the earth, something ancestral’.
She has no interest in commodifying feminism. Her relative ambivalence to #MeToo (or, as it’s referred to in France, #BalanceTonPorc – ‘squeal on your pig’) can seem jarring to a Brit. Seduction is central to French style, and French culture more generally, she explains. ‘Maybe that’s the reason the movement doesn’t spread so much here.’ She cites the celebrated French actor Catherine Deneuve, who, among 1OO other women in January 2O18, signed a letter condemning the movement for undermining sexual freedom, saying it encouraged ‘puritanism’. Deneuve later apologised to victims of sexual assault, but said she stood by her words. Ramsay-Levi says she agrees with her. She defers to her French identity as an explanation: ‘I think French people are super contradictory. It’s a very conservative country, very righthanded politically, but then we do vote on the left side. You believe one thing, but you say something else. It’s about putting very contradictory things together. Something very masculine and something very feminine.’
Before Chloé, as well as being Ghesquière’s right-hand, Ramsay-Levi was-known in fashion circles as the partner of Olivier Zahm, editor of Purple – a provocative glossy that is as committed to nudity as it is anything with the
veneer of being avant-garde. Zahm has been compared to Hugh Hefner, such is his passion for surrounding himself with undressed young women. Ramsay-Levi now parents their six-year-old son alone, which has made her firm on a form of work-life balance. ‘The father is not there a lot. My son can’t be with a babysitter every night, so I try to be strict on timings,’ she says.
She has little desire to jump on the bandwagon of promoting feminism to sell clothes. I can’t quite work out whether that’s because she doesn’t entirely agree with the premise, or because she’s too intelligent, too nuanced and too cynical to think that a T-shirt with some ‘women first’ slogan on it is a good idea in the first place. ‘Chloé is naturally feminine, it’s the DNA of the house. I don’t have to shout it,’ she says. Recently, however, she included a silhouette of herself making a ‘vulva’ triangle symbol with her hands on the invitation for her SS19 show. She didn’t tell anyone in her studio what the symbol meant, even as they printed it onto T-shirts. Some of them probably never realised, she suggests, smiling. When it comes to feminism, other brands ‘had to shout it’, she observes. ‘Here at Chloé, we don’t. I don’t want to be opportunistic,’ she says. ‘Things have layers. I like to think there is an intellectual honesty about that – I can’t just do a marketing campaign about feminism.’
Similarly, Ramsay-Levi has no time for deliberate ugliness or employed awkwardness, as is popular among some of the more conceptual designers, keen to question the way fashion has traditionally portrayed women. ‘I have a bit of a problem when a brand always works on ugliness – I get a bit bored,’ she says. ‘Beauty is love for me. I think beauty is the best thing we could show – if the world was beautiful, it would be peaceful.’
But the world is changing, I offer idealistically. Surely, increasingly, a younger consumer will want clothing that is wrapped up in ideas, beliefs, morals. ‘Unfortunately no,’ she says, pausing. ‘On the young side, of course ideas of beauty are changing. But often the message is about change, yet if you look at the clothes they’re super conservative. Most women are very conservative – it’s not just men’s vision imposed onto women. A luxury shopper can be very conservative.’
Critics have called Ramsay-Levi ‘her own best model’, such is the similarity between her personal wardrobe and the aesthetic she pushes for Chloé, but she winces at the thought. ‘It would be hard to find a female designer who is very different to what she designs,’ she says. Given they often don’t wear their own clothes, male womenswear designers receive more credit, treated like they have vision. Women designers are often described as smart shoppers with great style who are replicating their own wardrobe. For Ramsay-Levi, it’s less about putting her own look into the brand, and more about reflecting her own thoughts. ‘It’s just about sincerity,’ she says.
Her Chloé is a tougher version of the brand. Her ‘Chloé Girl’ has lived a life – maybe she’s divorced. Maybe she’s having a career crisis. Maybe she’s angry. Maybe she’s still working out what she thinks. I recall the Chloé adverts I grew up with: beautiful blonde girls running free, smiling. They were always so dreamy, so untroubled by real life. ‘We can do two girls running in the field being super light, but let’s give them a direction,’ says Ramsay-Levi. For her, those Chloé girls have to be going somewhere.
“I GET a BIT BORED when a BRAND alwaysWORKS on UGLINESS”