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.
Lonnie Bunch III is the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian. He’s pictured above in September 2017.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
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J. Scott Applewhite/AP
In a memo addressed to staffers sent Tuesday, the secretary of the Smithsonian, Lonnie G. Bunch III, defended the institution after the White House issued a 162-page report that characterizes the National Museum of American History as a place which has become “subject to institutional capture by a radical, activist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to telling the noble, honest story of the great country we know and love.”
In his email, which NPR has obtained, Bunch wrote in part: “While there will always be room for improvement, this report is not a fair characterization of the work and totality of the National Museum of American History. At the Smithsonian, our work is driven by scholarship, accuracy and an uncompromising commitment to tell the fullness of America’s story. As public servants and the keepers of this institution, we are charged with helping a nation find understanding, hope and clarity and as part of that duty, we are dedicated to excellence, reflection and growth.”
He continued: “We remain focused on what grounds us: a steadfast commitment to scholarship, nonpartisanship, independence, accuracy and integrity. For nearly 180 years, the Smithsonian has worked alongside partners across government — from the White House to Congress to our governing Board of Regents — guided by our enduring mission to increase and diffuse knowledge. That purpose remains: to pursue knowledge with rigor and to serve the American public with clarity and care.”
The White House report was issued on July 4 by the Domestic Policy Council under the title “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage.”
The council faults the National Museum of American History on a multitude of fronts, saying it underemphasized the Founding Fathers and early colonial and Revolutionary history; was not sufficiently celebratory of the country’s 250th anniversary; and that it engaged in “anti-white,” “illegal alien” and transgender activism.
It also accuses the museum of trying to “indoctrinate” teachers and students through its exhibitions, programming and teaching resources.
In the report, the council also specifically criticizes museum director Anthea Hartig, who has led the National Museum of American History since 2019 and is concurrently the president of the Organization of American Historians, calling her “an activist advancing an ideological agenda contradictory to the museum’s founding purpose of fostering patriotism.”
The Trump administration has made the Smithsonian museums one of its primary targets in its efforts to reshape cultural narratives to align with its viewpoints. In August 2025, the White House requested a “comprehensive internal review” of eight Smithsonian museums, including the National Museum of American History, following an executive order issued by President Trump in March 2025 in which he called for the removal of “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian’s offerings.
According to the Smithsonian’s charter, all of its 21 museums, 14 education and research centers, and the National Zoo are meant to be run independently of the federal government. The Smithsonian is overseen by Bunch and a board of regents, which includes Vice President Vance, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and other members appointed by Congress.
In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Bunch spoke about the Smithsonian’s 250th anniversary special exhibition at the Smithsonian Castle, which is called “American Aspirations.”
He told NBC: “It’s really important for people to understand that America is much an ideal as it is a place, that it’s a series of aspirations that have really shaped who this country is. And so for me, what is so powerful is to say, ‘Let us honor the words of Thomas Jefferson and the founders, but let us use those to challenge us to be better.’”
Jennifer Vanasco edited this story.
It was after the death of her son, Laith, that Esme Saleh decided to become a folk artist.
She had always been creative, experimenting with watercolors and learning to sew and embroider at a young age.
“I had a creative inkling,” she said, “but I never pursued it.”
Everything changed on Aug. 17, 2013.
In this series, we highlight independent makers and artists, from glassblowers to fiber artists, who are creating original products in and around Los Angeles.
When Saleh was nine months pregnant, she woke up with stomach pains and presumed she was in labor. She and her husband, Nasim, immediately went to the hospital, where doctors checked her and put the baby on a heart monitor. Saleh’s blood pressure was high, however, and the baby’s heart rate kept dropping. After about an hour, his heartbeat stopped. Doctors rushed her in for an emergency C-section, but it was too late. Laith did not survive.
Saleh lost a tremendous amount of blood and developed postpartum HELLP syndrome, a dangerous form of preeclampsia, but doctors were able to stabilize her.
When she woke up, the first thing she asked was, “How’s my baby?”
After losing her son in 2013, Esme Saleh left her job as a television producer. Since then, she has sold her hand-painted candles to local designers in Los Angeles and to LVMH in Paris.
“Aug. 17, 2013, was the most difficult day of my life, and Aug. 22 was the second most difficult, the day we drove home with an empty car seat,” she said of her and her husband’s new reality.
They named their son Laith Finn Saleh.
“His first name means ‘lion’ in Arabic. His middle name is an ode to Huckleberry Finn — sharp wit, kind heart, strong moral compass — all the attributes he’s imparted on us in spirit,” said Saleh, 45.
After such a devastating loss, she found it difficult to trust the world again. “It was hard to trust anything,” she said. “The medical system. Myself. It made me realize the fragility of bringing anything to life. We take so much for granted.”
So after years of working as a television producer, Saleh left broadcast journalism and leaned into her creative spirit.
She grew up in San Diego. Her mother was raised on a farm in Mexico, and her father moved from Tijuana to Los Angeles to be near her mother, who started working for a family in Sherman Oaks at 16. They eventually settled in San Diego, where Saleh’s father, now a church deacon, worked as a car salesman.
“The word Mystic has also become a driving force of what this journey means to me,” Saleh says. “A magical, otherworldly journey that has led me to some beautiful friendships, projects and unlimited well of curiosity. When I paint each pair of candles, it feels like I’m imparting a piece of that magic.”
“He always wanted to be a weatherman on TV,” she said, explaining how he hoped to get his big break on television by doing a weather report from the car lot.
Saleh wanted to be a broadcast journalist as her father had. After graduating from San Diego State, she interned in the sports department at CBS affiliate KFMB-TV although she didn’t know much about sports. She enjoyed sharing information with people, learned how to write plays of the week and felt she had found the right career.
But during a summer class at Mesa College, she started to think journalism might not be for her.
Saleh’s home is filled with her artwork. “My home expresses a lot of the things that I do,” she says. “If it works here, then I feel like I can put it out in the world.”
“I’m an empath — a sensitive soul — so when I was reading news about death and destruction, my eyes could not lie,” she said. Her professor told her, “This may not be your thing.” But when she arranged flowers on camera, she really came alive. She decided to work behind the scenes as a producer.
Her professor helped her get her first network news job in 2003, and she moved to Los Angeles, working on hard news and entertainment coverage.
After losing Laith a decade later, she couldn’t keep doing red-carpet interviews and acting like everything was fine. “It all felt so different, superficial and hard,” she said. “I felt like there was a bigger purpose out there for me. It’s in the small things that we find the big things.”
She started by painting folk art-inspired invitations for a friend’s baby shower. She painted delicate flowers, oranges and leaves on glass, leather and even lampshades. She created a logo. “I was just trying to say yes to things that were really scary,” she said. “Laith gave me the courage to do that.”
“I was just trying to get out of hole,” Saleh says of taking up painting after her son died.
Her first son, she said, became “a catalyst for painting.”
Then, at the first Thanksgiving during the COVID-19 pandemic when people could gather again, she had a light-bulb moment. “I was setting the table and didn’t have flowers or anything to add to decorate, so I thought, ‘I have these candles. I’m going to paint them and make them fancy,’ ” she said.
Her guests were impressed.
As time went on, painting taper candles helped her find joy again, and others noticed too.
“The one thing I hear when people pick up a pair of my candles is, ‘This makes me so happy. It makes me feel like there’s life here,’ ” she said.
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1. Saleh sometimes leads painting workshops where participants can decorate items like ornaments and lampshades.
2. Leather napkin rings Saleh has painted for Nathan Turner. 3. Saleh’s hand-painted candles retail for approximately $42 to $50.
One of the hardest parts of losing a child “is that you’re not just grieving the person, you’re grieving the future you imagined with them,” said Chicago-based grief specialist Carla Harvey. “A lifetime of love suddenly has nowhere to go. Creating art doesn’t erase grief, but it can become a way to carry it.”
Saleh created her brand Mystic by Esme in 2021, but it took her some time before she could gather the courage to try to sell them.
When she brought a shoebox full of samples to Nickey Kehoe, the L.A. store agreed to carry her candles. “I was beside myself,” Saleh said.
“Her candles were absolutely beautiful, and she had a fantastic spirit that made selling them a no-brainer,” said interior designer Todd Nickey, co-founder of Nickey Kehoe.
Saleh gets a surprise kiss from her dog Olive while painting candles at her dining room table.
Saleh viewed her new side project as a way to earn extra money for piano lessons for her 11-year-old son Linus, who is an entrepreneur like his mother. “I felt proud painting the candles while he was in lessons in the next room,” she said. “It became this circular economy, and it led to bigger opportunities for me.”
Last year, luxury conglomerate LVMH commissioned Saleh to paint 465 pairs of candles, or 930 candles in total, for its Chaumet jewelry brand. The collection was unveiled at an elaborate event at the Abbaye des Vaux de Cernay, just outside Paris.
“It was fun,” Saleh said about the process, which took six months from conception to delivery. “I felt like I was dressing my candles up for a party.”
Always a hard worker, which she attributes to being a first-generation child of immigrant parents, Saleh has now created a candle collection for Pierce and Ward in Los Feliz, leather napkin holders for interior designer Nathan Turner and pomegranate wrapping paper for Olive Ateliers. The candles retail between $42 to $50 for a pair, and recently, she developed a handsome pewter candle shaver that will be released in the winter.
Her dining room can sometimes feel like “an assembly line,” Saleh says.
Saleh holds a pair of candles she has embellished with florals.
Occasionally, she leads painting workshops, and she loves helping others tap into their creativity. The most meaningful one for her was an ornament workshop attended by several victims of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. “Without saying anything, we understood each other,” she said. “I understood that they were trying to create memories.”
Saleh knows what it means for things not to last — “impermanence,” she calls it — whether it is homes, candles or life itself.
She paints every day in the art-filled dining room of her home (unless it’s Little League season), surrounded by her family, candles and her two dogs, Lennon and Olive. ”Painting is like meditation,” she said. “You can sit in your dining room and tune everything out and just be in the moment.”
Even the family’s summer bucket list receives an artistic flourish.
An arch inside Saleh’s home receives a personalized touch.
She knows painting candles isn’t new, but she believes her motivation and the care she puts into each candle makes them special beyond their looks.
She has learned to look at the world that way, that painting in her dining room has offered her healing and joy, that she can trust herself and her body, that continuing to be inspired by her two boys — “one in spirit and the other here on Earth” — means that Laith will always be with her.
Many people think healing means moving on, said grief specialist Harvey, but “it’s really about finding ways to move forward while keeping the people we love woven into our lives. That’s what I see in her candles, not an ending, but an ongoing relationship with her son.”
“I feel like my son is channeling through this medium,” Saleh said, her voice breaking as she painted a taper. “He’s whispering to me, ‘Mom, this is your path.’ That has been my driving force. We’re going to grow this together.”
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