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.
Fresh Air critic Justin Chang says All of a Sudden (starring Tao Okamoto and Virginie Efira) was his favorite movie at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.
Courtesy of the Cannes Film Festival.
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Courtesy of the Cannes Film Festival.
The first Cannes Film Festival I ever attended, in May 2006, was a deliriously star-studded affair. Penélope Cruz, Ethan Hawke and Kirsten Dunst walked up the red-carpeted steps. Future Oscar hopefuls like Volver, Babel and Marie Antoinette competed for the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize. There were world premieres of blockbusters like The Da Vinci Code and X-Men: The Last Stand — terrible movies, but great photo ops. And near the end of the festival, I walked into a film I knew nothing about called Pan’s Labyrinth and emerged knowing I’d seen a classic.
This year’s Cannes kicked off with a 20th-anniversary screening of Pan’s Labyrinth, but otherwise, there wasn’t much of that 2006-era razzle-dazzle. The major Hollywood studios tightened their belts and stayed home, perhaps with still-fresh memories of the stinging Cannes reception for the last Indiana Jones movie back in 2023.
But there were stars here and there. Demi Moore and Stellan Skarsgård were on this year’s jury. Adam Driver and Miles Teller showed up for the world premiere of James Gray’s terrific 1986-set crime drama, Paper Tiger, in which they play brothers who unwisely go into business with the Russian mob. Driver and Teller are outstanding, and Scarlett Johansson is heartbreakingly good as a family member forced to deal with the fallout.
Paper Tiger deserved a prize, but it left the festival empty-handed. Instead, the jury awarded the Palme d’Or to the gripping and sometimes infuriating small-town drama Fjord. It’s the second Palme win for the Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu; he won his first in 2007 for the movie 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.
In Fjord, Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve are almost unrecognizable as an evangelical Christian couple who have recently moved from Romania to a small Norwegian town with their five children. When the couple are accused of child abuse, Fjord becomes a fierce battle between the forces of religious conservatism and secular liberalism. It may be set in Norway, but it’s likely to resonate with American audiences when it opens later this year.
I hope there will also be robust turnout for Minotaur, a perfectly chilled tale of adultery and murder that won the Grand Prix, or second place. It’s a remake of the 1969 Claude Chabrol drama La Femme Infidèle, this time set in Russia, not long after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The director of Minotaur, Andrey Zvyagintsev, nearly died of COVID during the pandemic, and it was moving to see him back in Cannes with a film this powerful and uncompromising in its critique of the Putin regime.
One of the buzziest out-of-competition titles was Club Kid, a hugely enjoyable comedy directed by the actor, writer, comedian and social-media star Jordan Firstman. He plays a gay New York City club promoter who’s sent reeling when he learns that he has a 10-year-old son. The result is basically a ketamine-laced version of every adult-bonds-with-cute-kid movie you’ve ever seen, but Firstman is a real talent.
Firstman’s also one of several queer filmmakers who made a bold impression at the festival this year. Jane Schoenbrun, the director of the inventive transgender allegory I Saw the TV Glow, came to Cannes with their third feature, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Starring a very game Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson, the movie is a clever homage to, and deconstruction of, ’80s and ’90s slasher thrillers, digging deep into the often-unspoken connections between our love of pop culture and our hang-ups about sex and desire.
Along with Paper Tiger, Club Kid and Camp Miasma were welcome reminders that American cinema isn’t close to dead, at Cannes or anywhere else. Even so, I can’t say that I minded the general absence of Hollywood at the festival this year. One of the reasons I keep returning to Cannes is that it shows interesting movies from all over the world — movies like the gorgeous and moving Rwanda-set drama, Ben’Imana, about efforts to bring about truth and reconciliation years after the 1994 genocide. The film earned its director, Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo, the Caméra d’Or prize for best debut feature.
My favorite film at Cannes this year was All of a Sudden, from the Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. Set in and around a Parisian elder-care home, it uses the close bond between two women — one French and one Japanese — to raise haunting questions about how we live, how we die, and most of all, how we talk to each other. Like Hamaguchi’s Oscar-winning Drive My Car, All of a Sudden is a reminder that something as simple as a conversation between friends can make for sublimely moving cinema. I can’t wait to see it again, and I can’t wait for you to see it, too.
Cary Elwes may not have been born in Los Angeles, but it’s probably fair to consider the native Brit an honorary Angeleno. The “Princess Bride” star was born in and spent his formative years kicking around London; he moved to L.A. in 1990, on his brother’s recommendation. He met his wife, photographer Lisa Marie Kurbikoff, at a cookoff in Malibu about a year later and the two married in 2000. A daughter, Dominique, arrived in 2007.
In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
Elwes has spent his years in California not just establishing his family life, but also further enmeshing himself in Hollywood. He’s appeared in everything from “Saw” to “Ella Enchanted,” and played a corrupt government agent in a couple of “Mission Impossible” movies. His latest role is as a former cop turned private detective in Peacock’s new crime thriller, “M.I.A.,” streaming now.
“I’ve been out here for quite a bit now and while [2025’s] fires were pretty devastating — changing a lot of the landscape and people’s lives in ways that none of us could have imagined — I’m hopeful,” Elwes says. “I feel like we’re going to build back stronger and better. Things can seem dark sometimes, but I still have a spark of hope in my heart.”
Here’s how Elwes would spend his perfect, hopeful Sunday in Los Angeles.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
10 a.m.: Coffee and a chat
We wake up around 10 a.m., which is kind of late for me. Then we’ll have our coffee. I tend to lean toward Gelson’s beans, which I find have a particular flavor I tend to like. I do like my coffee. It’s probably the only addiction I really have.
Anyway, after I finish up my coffee, I’ll typically ask my wife and daughter what they’d like to do for the day. My daughter is 19, and she’s terrific. I always tell my wife she’s the best production we’ll ever do together.
Noon: Leisurely lunch
My wife is very fond of this Italian restaurant in Woodland Hills called Casaléna. It’s right off Ventura Boulevard and it’s terrific. Even their salads are extraordinary. It’s fairly new, too, but it’s always booked out solid so you really have to make a reservation in advance. Luckily, my wife and daughter are organized, so if they want to go there, they’ll have planned ahead.
2 p.m.: Head to the movies
We like to go see movies at the Imax at Universal CityWalk. The quality of that theater is very, very good and seeing films on the biggest screen possible is important to us.
My wife and I went on a date to see “Michael” in Imax, which was sold out and it was phenomenal. Antoine Fuqua did a great job and our friend Colman [Domingo] was honestly transformative as Joe Jackson. And Jaafar Jackson, who’s Michael’s nephew, is remarkable. It’s an extraordinary film, but sold out with people cheering and dancing? That made it a phenomenon. People were interacting with the movie as it played and it was remarkable.
If we’re not interested in whatever’s playing at the time, we might go for a hike in Tapia Park. I grew up watching “MASH” as a kid and when I realized they filmed there, I thought “How blessed am I to be living just a few miles from where such an iconic series was made?”
It’s a really beautiful park too. If you take a long hike, you’ll see waterfalls and lots of wildlife. On a nice afternoon, taking the dog out there for a walk? You can’t beat it.
There’s so much rich history here. I remember going on the Universal Studio Tour for the first time when I visited L.A. as a kid. They had a thing where they’d pick a couple of tour guests and the guide would put you on camera in front of a blue screen and you’d reenact a scene from a movie. The tour also took you by the “Jaws” shark coming out of the water and through an old western town, and I found out years later that a director friend of mine had been making westerns there when I was a kid and I didn’t even know it.
That tour was fantastic. With parting the sea for “The Ten Commandments” and then the boulders coming down the hill during the rockslide? Absolutely magnificent.
5 p.m.: Pick a Getty, any Getty
Depending on what time our movie ends or if we just end up going for a walk instead, we might go over to the Getty Center. We love it there. Usually we’ll go in the afternoon — maybe we’ll have a late lunch up there — and sometimes we’ll go to the Getty Villa instead, which luckily survived the Palisades fire.
We just love being around art. We’ll walk through the entire collection, plus whatever exhibit they have on at the time. We’ll go to LACMA sometimes, too, or even the Academy Museum to see whatever new exhibits they have.
Culturally, we really try to keep busy. Sometimes we’ll want to sit at home and play Spite and Malice or watch a show on TV, but mostly I try to go out and encourage my family to do the same, especially because we live in such a wonderfully diverse, cultural city.
7 p.m.: Taco time
I always leave meal decisions up to the girls, and sometimes they like to go out and get tacos. We like the fish tacos at Escuela. It’s pretty close to Quentin Tarantino’s movie theater, the New Beverly Cinema, which we like to go to as well. I took my daughter to see “Jaws” there, in fact, which she loved.
9 p.m.: More movies
I’m trying to educate my daughter in the films and TV shows that I watched growing up. She’s taking a film history class in school. She wants to be an actor as well, so I want her to have an understanding of the history of film and history of performance, so I show her the great performances that inspired me as a kid and encourage her in that way.
When I grew up in England, we literally had two channels, both in black and white. Young people can’t quite wrap their heads around that now, but it really did make you pay attention because you had to be sitting in front of the television to catch a show or movie you wanted to watch.
I remember that the BBC, particularly on weekends, would have matinee screenings of movies. We actually had pretty good quality TV in England growing up, but they’d also heavily focus on British films from the ‘40s all the way through to the ‘60s so I got my education from that particular style of films, like the postwar films, ‘50s films, and the Ealing comedies. David Lean and Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson … a lot of the films they were in or directed really helped shape who I am today.
Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers had a very strong influence on me as a kid, too, so I really want to try to share with my daughter why these films meant so much to me.
10:30 p.m.: Books in bed
I’m not really a late-night person anymore. I used to be when I was a kid, but now, unless we’re out on a date, my wife and I are homebodies.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP
A federal judge has blocked President Trump from adding his name to the Kennedy Center, saying that the Washington, D.C. arts complex was named for the late president John F. Kennedy. In a ruling on Friday, the judge also temporarily blocked the administration from closing the Kennedy Center for a planned two-year renovation that was slated to begin in July.
U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper wrote in his ruling that: “The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so. Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”
A Kennedy Center spokesperson told NPR in an email Friday afternoon that it will appeal the decision. Roma Daravi, vice president of public relations for the complex, wrote: “We will review the decision carefully though the reality remains — the Center requires an urgent and significant restoration – a truth that even the plaintiff acknowledges. With $257 million secured by President Trump and approved by Congress, the resources are in place and we remain committed to pursuing every lawful avenue to ensure the Trump Kennedy Center is restored as a national cultural landmark for all Americans to enjoy.”
NPR has requested comment from the White House, but did not receive an immediate reply.
As part of his ruling, Judge Cooper ordered that all signage and online materials referring to the “Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” the “Trump Kennedy Center,” or anything similar must be removed within 14 days.
The judge also blocked, for now, plans to close the Kennedy Center for two years of renovations. Trump and the center’s current voting board members – all of whom were selected by the president, who also became chairman of the center last year – had planned to start the renovations in early July, just after the 250th anniversary celebrations. In his 94-page ruling, Judge Cooper called the renovation plans “murky,” and wrote: “None of the board members had sufficient information in advance of the March 16 meeting to make a well-considered decision to close the center.” The center has been winding down its programming and has already dismissed most of its programming staff.
Referring to a Truth Social post written by President Trump in February, the judge also wrote: “There was no ‘one year review of the Trump Kennedy Center, that has taken place with Contractors, Musical Experts, Art Institutions, and other Advisors and Consultants, deciding between’ complete and partial closure, as President Trump claimed.”
Cooper’s ruling resulted from a lawsuit filed in March by Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio, an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center board whose voting rights there were stripped last year.
The ruling does not prevent the Kennedy Center’s board from a future closure, but the judge said that it should do so only after the board has “sufficient information to make a considered, independent decision, taking account of its obligation to both maintain and operate a premiere arts venue and its solemn duty to memorialize a fallen President.”
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