Lifestyle

Chemena Kamali of Chloé: The Queen of the Blouse

Published

1 year ago

March 6, 2025

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.

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Lifestyle

The iconic South African theater that took on apartheid

Published

3 hours ago

March 30, 2026

Press Room

The iconic South African theater that took on apartheid

Performers Percy Mtwa, left, and Mbongeni Ngema in a scene from “Woza Albert” at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1981.

Ruphin Coudyzer/AP

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Ruphin Coudyzer/AP

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa—When it first started in the 1970s, South Africa’s Market Theatre staged plays considered to be so subversive that it became a regular target of the apartheid government’s zealous censors.

Even the fact that its audiences were made up of Black and white South Africans mingling together was unheard of in a city where the law separated areas and people by race.

The theater, established in an old fruit and vegetable market in central Johannesburg, was born at a pivotal time in “the Struggle” — the fight against the apartheid government. It opened its doors just days after the 1976 Soweto uprising changed the country forever.

Youth took to the streets to protest schools teaching in the Afrikaans language and the ensuing government crackdown saw hundreds killed.

“So, we opened our doors three days after that event,” says the theater’s current artistic director Greg Homann. “The Market Theatre has been forged in those days of June 16 and now has really carried the weight of telling the national story of South Africa all the way through the dark years of apartheid.”

This year, the theater, where legendary South Africans like actor John Kani and playwright Athol Fugard made their names, is celebrating its 50th anniversary.

John Kani arrives at the premiere of “Murder Mystery 2” on Tuesday, March 28, 2023, at the Regency Village Theatre in Los Angeles.

Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP

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Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP

In that half century it produced plays of international renown, including “Woza Albert,” “Sophiatown,” and “Sizwe Banzi is Dead,” and the hit musical “Sarafina” — about the Soweto uprising.

“Sarafina,” written by jazz musician Hugh Masekela, went on to Broadway and became a Hollywood movie starring Whoopie Goldberg.

But many initially doubted it would survive. Tony-award-winning actor John Kani said he was stunned when the theatre’s founders Barney Simon and Mannie Manim first told him their vision.

“I thought these two whities were nuts, it’s not going to work, and they said to me and Athol Fugard that it’s going to be open to all. I said what are you talking about, it’s ’75, ’76” Kani recalled in a 2014 interview.

But despite his initial reservations, Kani said, “my entire career fell in place on this stage.”

Still, there were times when it was touch and go.

The theater “was often raided. Actors were sometimes in some kind of danger,” Homann says.

And often, apartheid government censors turned up.

“They would then go onto stage and they would start doing their censorship in front of the audience,” he continues. “And it almost became like a second act of the production where the censorship was actively part of the work.”

‘No Black, no white’

Then there was the fact it was a place where all races could mix, with the theater’s directors cleverly finding loopholes to circumvent the law.

“At one point our bar was sold for one rand, so, you know, the equivalent of 50 American cents, so that it was privately owned,” says Homann.

Being privately owned meant that audience members of color “could stand in that space legally,” he explains. “But if they stepped one meter into the foyer they were illegal by apartheid laws.”

United States First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, left, and Vice President Al Gore applaud during a variety musical performance of “Sophiatown” by members of the Market Theatre Company on Monday, May 9, 1994 in Johannesburg. Rev. Jesse Jackson is seated behind Gore.

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Michael Yassukovich/AP

While the theater’s work helped spread the message of the anti-apartheid movement at home and abroad, some white audience members were triggered.

“Quite a number of times I’ve seen them whites. You know, they get up,” recalls director Arthur Molepo, a theater veteran who has been involved with the Market since its inception.

“You see a man grabbing a woman and just walking out during the play, meaning they were angry, of course, or they’re not agreeing or believing what we’re saying,” said Molepo.

Still, he remembers the early years of the market as a heady time.

“There was no black, there was no white. We were just a whole group, a whole bunch. So we were making things, making theater,” he says.

An image from the February 2026 production of “Marabi” at the Market Theatre.

Ngoma Ka Mphahlele/Market Theatre

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Ngoma Ka Mphahlele/Market Theatre

This year Molepo directed a new production of an apartheid-era play — “Marabi.”

From the applause and standing ovation it was clear the subject matter still resonated, even with what appeared to be a mainly Gen Z and millenial audience who never knew life under apartheid.

The story follows a Black family’s struggles in the first half of the twentieth century and ultimately ends with their forced removal from their home under the white government’s racial segregation laws.

Gabisile Tshabalala, 35, played the lead role in Marabi, but she grew up in a free South Africa and doesn’t remember apartheid.

However, the actress says: “Theater is extremely important for young South Africans….especially as Black people…we get to tell our stories.”

And the theater isn’t content to rest on it’s historic laurels.

It “tells the South African story,” says Homann. “whatever that might be of its day.”

“So during the ’80s, that was the story of the fight against apartheid. More recently, it’s the challenges of a young democracy.”

Issues like access to education, corruption, and gender-based violence are all being tackled on stage as the Market turns 50, with South Africans hoping for many more years of thought-provoking theater.

Lifestyle

L.A. Times Concierge: I live in O.C. My kids live in Santa Clarita. Looking for nice spots to meet halfway.

Published

4 hours ago

March 30, 2026

Press Room

L.A. Times Concierge: I live in O.C. My kids live in Santa Clarita. Looking for nice spots to meet halfway.

My husband and I live in Mission Viejo. Our older son, his wife and two children (ages 5 and nearly 4) live in Newhall. We love spending time together, but it’s quite a trek on the 5 Freeway. Last year, we went to the aquarium in Long Beach, which was great fun. Another day, we enjoyed a day of hiking and a picnic at Placerita Canyon Nature Center near my son’s home. We would love some suggestions about other places to visit which would maybe be a little more centrally located and fun for the whole family. Thanks
— Cathy McCoy

Looking for things to do in L.A.? Ask us your questions and our expert guides will share highly specific recommendations.

Here’s what we suggest:

Cathy, I understand your pain. Driving 80 miles can feel like an odyssey, especially in SoCal. Thankfully, there are loads of fun places where your family can meet in the middle (or close to it). I’ve rounded up some solid options. By the way, the driving times mentioned here are a rough estimate for a weekend day without traffic, but as you probably know, your actual time may vary.

Since you all enjoyed the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, how about switching it up and spending the day with a different set of animals at the Montebello Barnyard Zoo for your next outing? That would be about a 40- to 50-minute drive for both of you. Open since 1968, the zoo is home to horses, goats, sheep and donkeys that you can pet (and feed for an extra $3). If you’re feeling adventurous, you can ride a pony or take a leisurely trip on a John Deere tractor train. “It’s a great place for young ones to learn that animals outside the home need and deserve the same kind of care that we show our pets,” Etan Rosenbloom writes in a Times guide to things to do with kids around L.A. General admission is $11, and you can sometimes find deals on Groupon as well. Afterward, head to Blvd Mrkt, a food hall in downtown Montebello that sells a variety of food so everyone can get what they want.

Another great option is the South Coast Botanic Garden on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, which might be about an hour drive for both of you. I learned about this spot from my dear late colleague Jeanette Marantos, who was a gardening expert in her own right. The garden, which has more than 2,500 species of plants and five miles of trails, also includes a kids area, which features “a nursery rhyme theme with a large dollhouse, a charming bridge and plants matched to the stories,” Marantos wrote. My editor Michelle Woo also loves this garden. “You can take a leisurely walk along the accessible loop trail or get really into the nooks and crannies of the place, discovering trees with giant roots that kids love to climb on and koi fish swimming in a shaded pond,” she says, adding that she’s excited for Thomas Dambo’s trolls exhibit that opens Sunday. If you get hungry, you can stop by Dottie’s at the Koi Pond, which sells food, beer, wine and specialty cocktails on Saturdays and Sundays. Carry-in food is permitted if pre-prepared.

If you’re interested in space travel, you should visit the Columbia Memorial Space Center, which is the ultimate cosmic playground. Located in Downey (known as “home of the Apollo”) — about a 40-minute drive for you and a 50-minute drive for your son’s family — the recently renovated museum features a play area, robotics lab and interactive exhibits on space exploration, including a shuttle landing simulator. Admission is $5 for adults and kids, $3 for seniors ages 65 and up and free for children ages 3 and under.

Speaking of aviation, another spot worth checking out is the Proud Bird in El Segundo, about a 45- to 50-minute drive for both of you. Here, you can enjoy delicious bites as you watch planes land at Los Angeles International Airport, which is just a couple of miles away. Woo calls it “the perfect spot for a multigeneration gathering.” “Our extended family once celebrated Christmas there when everyone was too tired to cook,” she adds. “You can order solid barbecue from Bludso’s, have a drink by a bonfire pit and let the kids play on the playground as planes fly by.” She also suggests the Point in El Segundo. It’s an open-air shopping and dining center that has a large lawn where the kids can play and the grownups can grab a drink from Lil’ Simmzy’s.

I hope these recommendations are useful as you plan your next family outing (and that they also save you some gas money). Whatever you end up doing together, I’m sure that your family, especially the little ones, will just be grateful to spend quality time with you. Have fun!

Lifestyle

Sunday Puzzle: Vowel Renewals

Published

15 hours ago

March 29, 2026

Press Room

Sunday Puzzle

NPR

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NPR

On air challenge

I’m going to give you some seven-letter words. For each one, change one consonant to a vowel to spell a new word.
Ex. CONCEPT –> CONCEIT

1. REVENGE

2. TRACTOR

3. PLASTIC

4. CAPTION

5. SCUFFLE

6. POMPOMS

7. MOBSTER

8. LINKAGE

9. TEMPERS

Last week’s challenge

Last week’s challenge came from Joseph Young, of St. Cloud, Minn. Name an animal. The first five letters of its name spell a place where you may find it. The last four letters of this animal will name another animal — but one that would ordinarily not be found in this place. What animals are these?

Challenge answer

Stallion —> Stall, Lion

This week’s challenge

This week’s challenge comes from Peter Gordon, of Great Neck, N.Y. Name some tools used by shoemakers. After this word place part of a shoe. The result will be the subject of a famous painting. What is it?

If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Thursday, April 2 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.