Lifestyle
Chemena Kamali of Chloé: The Queen of the Blouse
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, almost 500 in her house alone. For her, the blouse — that relatively unappreciated top, redolent of school uniforms, Edwardian nannies and 1970s career girls that lost its primacy of place in the woman’s wardrobe to the T-shirt decades ago — is actually the Platonic ideal of a garment.
“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. Aside from the blouses, a big modular desk from the 1980s and some pottery and family tchotchkes are the only objects in the room. She and her husband, Konstantin Wehrum, and their two sons, ages 3 and 5, moved into the house when she got the job at Chloé last year — they had been on their way to California — and she has not had a lot of time to unpack.
“Historically, the blouse was a man’s undergarment,” she said. When she talks about something she loves, you can hear her working through her ideas in real time: “Then, in Victorian times, the blouse became feminized. Postwar, it got more tailored. In the 1970s, again, more fluid, and in the ’80s, more powerful. It can be formal and strict or playful and romantic. It reflects personalities. It reflects all of the things that make us who we are as women.”
That’s a lot of meaning to load onto a garment, but to Ms. Kamali, the blouse is not just a bit of fabric with buttons.
The Shirt on Her Back
No one wears a blouse better than Ms. Kamali, not even converts like Karlie Kloss and Liya Kebede, who have begun to line the Chloé front rows in her lacy tops and wooden platforms. Ms. Kamali’s typical uniform starts with a Chloé blouse of her own design or one from her collection, often in an aged ivory with a touch of embroidery to lend it a vaguely bohemian air.
“A blouse is so much easier than a dress,” she said.
She pairs them with high-waist Chloé jeans, shredded at the hem, white Chloé high-top sneakers and a tangle of necklaces, some new, some sourced at the same vintage markets where she finds her blouses. With waist-length brown hair parted in the center and framing a face that seems makeup free, it creates a vibe that is both Venice Beach hippie — even though Ms. Kamali grew up mostly in Dortmund, Germany — and efficient. If Stevie Nicks had a day job at a venture capital fund, she might look like this.
“She’s aspirational,” said the actress Rashida Jones, who met Ms. Kamali a year ago. “But it doesn’t feel unattainable. It feels grounded.”
Kaia Gerber, who has modeled for Ms. Kamali and wears her clothes off the runway, put it this way: “Chemena herself is a testament to holding your power without having to adhere to the judgments society makes about women based on the way they dress.”
Ms. Kamali, 43, started collecting blouses in 2003, which was around the time she got her first job at Chloé. She knew she wanted to be a designer when she was a child, and in Germany, she said, that meant being like Karl Lagerfeld, the most famous German designer, who was then at Chloé. She went to the University of Applied Sciences in Trier, Germany, and talked her way into Chloé as an intern during the Phoebe Philo era.
“The first designer piece I ever bought, actually, was at the company’s employee sale for 50 euros,” she said, pointing to a white T-shirt with a “necklace” of silver teardrops woven into the front. “That’s when my vintage obsession started, because I remember members of the team coming back from trips with big duffel bags and unpacking treasures they’d found. I realized how certain source pieces can trigger a creative process that can flow into the concept of a collection.”
She got a degree from Central Saint Martins, worked at Alberta Ferretti; Chloé again, under Clare Waight Keller; and then Saint Laurent before returning to Chloé in the top job. But wherever she went, Ms. Kamali kept buying blouses. She does not buy, as many collectors do, for historic or material value but rather according to details that catch her eye — “the volume or the construction of the sleeve or yoke.”
As a result, her pieces are not forbiddingly expensive. They range from “super cheap to maybe $700,” she said, though the average is about $300. She sources them from eBay, vintage fairs like A Current Affair in Los Angeles and what has turned into an extended network of vintage dealers.
“You go to a store, you go to a market and you meet this person who says, ‘OK, you want more of this, I have some stuff in my basement,’” she said. “Then, connecting to this community, this group of obsessive people all about the rare find, becomes an addiction.” It also made her perfect for Chloé.
All Blouses All the Time
The blouse is such an important part of the Chloé aesthetic that when the Jewish Museum in New York held the first major retrospective devoted to Chloé in 2023, it dedicated an entire room to the blouse. As a garment, it encapsulates the easy-breezy-feminine tone set by the founder, Gaby Aghion, in 1952, and was replicated to varying extents by the designers who came after, including Mr. Lagerfeld, Stella McCartney, Ms. Keller and Gabriela Hearst.
But while they all made blouses, none made them as central to their aesthetic as Ms. Kamali had. It is the way “she connects to the fundamental values of the house,” said Philippe Fortunato, the chief executive of the fashion and accessories maisons at Richemont, the Swiss conglomerate that owns Chloe.
Indeed, Ms. Kamali’s first collection for Chloé was built around a blouse. Specifically, a piece Karl Lagerfeld designed for Chloé with a black capelet of sorts built into the top. The blouse, she said, got her “thinking about how the cape is an iconic piece in Chloé’s history.”
Just as the lace in a Victorian blouse had inspired the lacy tiers of the last collection, which were visible not just in actual blouses, but also in playsuits with the affect of blouses and dresses that looked like longer versions of the blouses.
And just as, for her third collection, to be unveiled March 6, Ms. Kamali was thinking about something Karl Lagerfeld once said about “the basic idea being the simplest of all: a blouse and a skirt.”
“That kind of triggered in me the idea of really looking at the blouse not as a component of a look, but as the main component,” she said. That in turn led her to the idea of the blouse as a container of historical fragments: a dolman sleeve, say, or an exaggerated collar or shoulder. All of which made their way into the collection.
“It’s not about copying,” she said. “It’s about using the blouse as a way to root things in the past or in tradition.” And signal that it has a place in the future.
And as Lauren Santo Domingo, a founder of Moda Operandi, reports, it’s working. Chloé is “one of our fastest sellout designers,” Ms. Santo Domingo said, noting that sales of Chloé tops had grown 138 percent since Ms. Kamali’s first collections appeared.
For the photographer David Sims, who shoots the Chloé campaigns, Ms. Kamali has essentially created “the representation of a new French kind of woman, with a play around nudity and embroidery that suggests ownership over a sexual energy and power that feels like an answer to so many of the questions that have sprung up recently.” Questions about gender and stereotype; questions about the male gaze. Doing that through the prism of a garment that was essentially relegated to the dustbin of fashion and old rock stars is, he said, kind of “radical.”
But that tension is actually the point of Ms. Kamali’s Chloé, which has taken the Chloé girl and grown her into a woman.
“The term ‘Chloé girl’ is so connected to how the world perceived the house in the first place,” Ms. Kamali said. “But the word ‘girl’ is reductive. I never want the Chloé woman to be only one thing. No woman is. She has shifting moods and feelings. Ease and optimism always exists with tension. These contrasts and these opposites are what makes everything interesting.”
Including, maybe especially, the shirt on your back.
Why aren’t we talking about colorectal cancer?
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If more and more young people are dying of colorectal cancer, why aren’t we talking about it? Is it because we’re too ashamed of our bodies?
Rates of colorectal cancer are rising, especially for people under 50. But it’s hard to raise awareness for a cancer that a lot of us find hard to talk about. In a recent essay for The Cut, writer Laurie Abraham described her experience of colon cancer, which included a lot of embarrassment. Talking about your bowel movements is…not fun. Can you relate?
Today, Brittany is joined by Laurie and Dr. Kimmie Ng, Co-Director of the Colon and Rectal Cancer Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, to get into the cultural shame around how we talk about colon cancer – and how that extends to a lack of funding and research.
Follow Brittany Luse on Instagram: @bmluse
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This episode was produced by Corey Antonio Rose and Liam McBain. It was edited by Neena Pathak. Engineering support came from Becky Brown. Our Supervising Producer is Barton Girdwood. Our Executive Producer is Veralyn Williams. Our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sangweni.
In an overstuffed workshop in East L.A., Chris Francis reached out a heavily tattooed arm and pulled a single shoe box from one of the floor-to-ceiling shelves lining the walls.
“Anjelica Huston,” the shoemaker and artist said. “Let’s see what’s in here.”
Removing the top of the box, he revealed two carved wooden forms known as shoe lasts that cobblers use to make their wares. Beneath those were strips of yellowing shoe patterns and a tracing of the actor’s foot with a note written in loopy cursive:
To Pasquale
My happy feet shall thank you
— Anjelica Huston
The Di Fabrizio collection includes shoe measurements for stars like Nancy Sinatra, Kim Novak, Joe Pesci and Madeline Kahn, all adorned with green, white and red striped ribbon.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
“Cool, huh?” Francis said, gazing reverently at the box’s contents. “Every time I open one it’s amazing. It’s like Christmas all the time.”
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For the last three years, Francis has been surrounded by a sprawling archive of famous feet originally amassed by Pasquale Di Fabrizio, the late shoemaker to the stars. From the early ‘60s to the early 2000s, Di Fabrizio created custom footwear for the rich, famous and notorious out of his humble shoe shop on 3rd Street.
The shoes went to his customers, but his voluminous collection includes shoe lasts, patterns, drawings, correspondences, leather samples and handwritten notes from thousands of clients, all stored in cardboard shoe boxes that the Italian immigrant trimmed with green, white and red striped ribbon.
The names, written in bold Magic Marker on the front of each box are a who’s who of entertainers from the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and beyond: Liza Minnelli, Tom Jones, Richard Pryor, Robert De Niro, Sarah Jessica Parker, Bea Arthur, Arsenio Hall, Nancy Sinatra, Ace Frehley. The list goes on and on.
Francis found foot measurements, wooden shoe lasts and a shoe in progress that Pasquale Di Fabrizio made for Ginger Rogers in a box marked with her name.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
“Shoe Machine” is one of Chris Francis’ art pieces that he has shown at museums.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
“So many great people stood on these pieces of paper,” Francis said, looking at the stacks of boxes around him. “Roy Orbison. Eva Gabor. Stella Stevens. Lauren Bacall. I could pull these down all day.”
Francis never met Di Fabrizio, who died in 2008, but in 2022 he traded two pairs of his sculptural shoe-art pieces to Di Fabrizio’s friend and fellow shoemaker Gary Kazanchyan for the entirety of the Italian shoemaker’s archive. Three years later, Francis is still making his way through it all.
The amount of material is overwhelming, but he is committed to preserving Di Fabrizio’s legacy. Ultimately, he wants to find a space where he can share it with others.
“I never want to be without it, but I’m realistic that it deserves to be appreciated by more than just myself,” he said. “If my life’s work ended up in somebody’s hands, I don’t think I’d want them to just keep it for themselves forever.”
A shoemaker’s journey
Francis isn’t just cataloging L.A.’s shoemaking history, he’s helping to keep it alive.
Over the last decade and a half he’s made a name for himself as a custom shoemaker, creating handmade bespoke footwear for rockers like former Runaways guitarist Lita Ford and Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols, as well as sculptural art shoes that are displayed in museums like the Craft Contemporary, the Palm Springs Art Museum and SCAD FASH in Atlanta.
Wooden shoe lasts hang from the ceiling as Chris Francis works on a shoe for the singer Lita Ford in his garage.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
In his East L.A. workshop, he eschews modern technology, focusing instead on traditional methods of shoemaking, often with hand tools.
“The handmade shoe is alive and well in this shop,” he said, dressed in pressed black slacks and tinted sunglasses, chunky gold rings gleaming on his fingers. “There’s no computer here, and even the records half the time are vinyls or 78s.”
Making shoes by hand is time-consuming and expensive work — Francis doesn’t sell a pair of shoes for less than $1,800 — but for his mostly musician clientele, a sturdy, custom-made, comfortable shoe that also boasts over-the-top style is well worth the price.
“At my price point, my customers are buying something that’s really a tool,” he said. “It’s part of their look, but it also has to hit 27 guitar pedals, keep all of its crystal, be beautiful, last multiple tours and they have to be able to stand in it all night.”
Francis, who has a certain aging-rocker swagger himself, never expected to become a shoemaker.
After going to art school and hopping freight trains for several years, he moved to Los Angeles in 2002 originally to join the Merchant Marines. Instead he found work hanging multi-story graphics and billboards on the side of hotels and high-rises on the Sunset Strip and at casinos in Las Vegas. “That gave me the same thrill of riding a freight train,” he said. “Being on a high-rise building and rappelling down.”
Francis found fabric samples and designs for shoes that Pasquale Di Fabrizio made for a Broadway production of the musical “Marilyn: An American Fable.”
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Shoemaker and artist Chris Francis makes shoes the traditional way in his workshop in East Los Angeles.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
He discovered he had a knack for pattern making in 2008 when he began creating hand-stitched leather jackets to wear to the Hollywood parties he had started attending with his now-fiancee. One day a stranger approached him and said she knew someone who would appreciate a jacket like the ones he was making. She was a stylist for Arnel Pineda, the lead singer of Journey. Commissions from Mötley Crüe and other rock bands followed.
A few years later he became interested in making shoes, but although he knocked on the door of several shoe shops in town, he couldn’t find a mentor.
“They didn’t have time, or they’d say, ‘You belong in a rock and roll band, you’re not one of us,’” he said. “But I would say, ‘Just teach me one thing, one trick.’ And everyone had time to teach one trick.”
It was an education in much more than shoemaking.
“Almost every shoemaker I met had immigrated to the country,” he said. “So I learned how to make shoes from the Italians, from guys from Armenia, Iran, Iraq, Russia, Syria, from everybody. And while doing so, I learned about all these different cultures.”
‘He was the king’
As Francis dove deeper into the history of shoemaking in Los Angeles, one name kept coming up again and again: Pasquale Di Fabrizio.
The late Pasquale Di Fabrizio, a cobbler to the Hollywood elite, photographed in front of his collection of shoe lasts, circa 1982.
(Bret Lundberg / Images Press / Getty Images)
“I started asking other makers about him, and they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we remember him,’” Francis said. “He was the king.”
For more than 50 years Di Fabrizio was the most sought after shoemaker in Los Angeles. He made Liberace’s rhinestone-encrusted footwear and shod Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Donald Duck for touring productions of Disney on Parade. He was the go-to shoemaker for country western stars, Vegas showgirls, Hollywood movie stars, gospel singers and casino owners. The Rat Pack helped put him on the map.
“My best customer is Dean Martin,” Di Fabrizio told The Times in 1972. “He buys 40 pairs a year.”
Sporting a thick, bristled mustache and oversize glasses, Di Fabrizio had a tough reputation. He once kicked a movie star out of his shop because the star brought back a pair of patent leather shoes that he claimed were defective. Di Fabrizio accused him of missing the urinal and peeing on them at the Oscars.
“Never come back here again,” he said in his thick Italian accent.
The shoemaker occasionally made house calls, but his customers mostly came to him. In his workshop on 3rd Street near Crescent Heights, he would trace their bare feet on a piece of paper and measure the circumference of each of their feet at the ball, around the arch, the heel and the ankle. Then he would customize a pre-carved wooden last from Italy, adding thin pieces of leather 1 millimeter at a time to more perfectly mimic the unique shape of the client’s foot.
The size and shapes of the lasts varied wildly. He once told a reporter that it took “half a cow” to make shoes for Wilt Chamberlain, who wore a size 15. In his archives, Francis found a petite high heel shoe last roughly the length of his hand.
Francis holds a foot tracing and shoe lasts made for Robert De Niro by Pasquale Di Fabrizio.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
“Di Fabrizio did lots of shoes for little people,” Francis said. “He really offered an important service for that community. They could have formal footwear rather than having only the option of wearing kids shoes.”
The same lasts could be used over and over again to make several pairs of shoes, as long as the heel height was the same. Each last went in its own box decorated with a ribbon in the colors of the Italian flag.
“It’s so simple, but he claims his territory with that ribbon,” Francis said. “He cared enough to take one extra step. It’s what really made that collection iconic.”
A legacy preserved
Francis first encountered Di Fabrizio’s archives in 2010 when Kazanchyan offered him a job at Andre #1 Custom Made Shoes on Sunset Boulevard. Kazanchyan inherited the shop from his uncle, Andre Kazanchyan, who once worked with Di Fabrizio and became his good friend.
Gary Kazanchyan and Di Fabrizio were close as well. When Di Fabrizio retired in the early 2000s, Kazanchyan hired all of the guys who worked at his shop. Di Fabrizio was at Kazanchyan’s wedding and when the older shoemaker was in a nursing home at the end of his life, Kazanchyan visited him every day.
For years Kazanchyan stored as many of the ribbon-trimmed boxes as he could fit in his Hollywood shop, but just before COVID he moved his shop to his garage in Burbank and transferred Di Fabrizio’s archives to his backyard. “At one point, my whole backyard was this mountain of shoe lasts,” he said.
Chris Francis, left, and Gary Kazanchyan at Palermo’s Italian Restaurant in Los Feliz.
(Deborah Netburn / Los Angeles Times)
Kazanchyan started a renovation on his house in 2022 and could no longer store Di Fabrizio’s archive in his backyard. He’d sold some of the most famous shoe lasts at auction — a bundle of Di Fabrizio’s shoe lasts for Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. went for $4,375 in 2013 — but he still had several tons of material stacked on pallets and covered in tarps. He remembered that Francis loved the collection, so he called him and asked if he wanted it. Francis did.
Francis didn’t have the money to purchase the collection in cash, but he offered Kazanchyan two art pieces that he’d exhibited and Kazanchyan accepted. The first carload of boxes Francis took to his studio included lasts for Wayne Newton, Paula Abdul, Ginger Rogers, Burt Reynolds and Sylvester Stallone.
“My excitement was on fire,” he said.
Francis spent a few weeks sorting through the archive and discarding lasts and shoe boxes that were too covered in mold or deteriorated to be worth keeping. Just before a rainstorm threatened the rest of the collection, he brought thousands of shoe lasts to his studio but even now regrets that he was unable to save it all.
“I tried to grab the big names, but there was so much I couldn’t keep,” he said. “It was heartbreaking.”
The boxes hold stories — and life lessons
Living and working among the Di Fabrizio collection has taught Francis a lot more than just the art of making shoes.
“I’m constantly seeing the obituary of a celebrity who has passed and I go to the workshop and there’s their box,” he said. “It really lets you know that life is for the living. It’s up to you to be responsible and live your life when you’re alive. Be yourself, teach others, leave something behind.”
Hanging onto the collection has not been easy — but Francis believes he was chosen from beyond to care for Di Fabrizio’s archive and to share it with others responsibly.
He’s still not sure what that will look like, but he’s determined to try.
And in the meantime, he is also determined to keep the traditional art of shoemaking alive in Los Angeles.
If you look around his workshop, you’ll spot several boxes adorned with red, white and blue striped ribbon.
Francis is making those boxes his own.
Working with hand tools, Chris Francis makes a custom pair of shoes for musician Lita Ford.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: Bobbi Brown’s massively successful career started because of two words, “Why not?” Why not cold call a bunch of famous make up artists to get her first job in the industry? Why not make her own make up? Why not go into business with a global cosmetics brand, then break up with them decades later? Why not start over in her sixties, launch a new company and become a TikTok star in the process?
When Bobbi Brown asks “Why not?” it’s like she’s daring someone to answer. Daring someone to curb her ambition or thwart her dreams. Which is impossible since she has already made up her mind to go for it.
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