Designing Beyond Chloé: Inside Clare Waight Keller’s Parisian Home
The effortless design ethos of Clare Waight Keller, creative director of French brand Chloé, is nowhere more evident than in her Parisian home
Chloé’s Clare Waight Keller’s Parisian Home
A look at the creative director’s cavernous apartment just off the Bois de Boulogne in Paris’s 16th arrondissement.
THE FITTING MODEL was standing in a sheer, gauzy frock whose many pleats around the bottom were scrunched and folded this way and that, held in place by dozens of pins. When it floated down the runway at Chloé’s fall/winter 2016 show in March, it was a billowy number splotched with colors like sunlight bouncing off a lake. It’s wispy, wood-nymphy stuff that falls loosely on a coltishly feminine, boyishly rumpled creature that the brand has dubbed the Chloé girl.
Here in the studio in Paris’s eighth arrondissement, a month earlier, the dress was still just a monochrome mock-up, and Clare Waight Keller, Chloé’s creative director, was scowling dubiously at it, pulling out pins and then sticking them back in. “Could you please go take a walk?” Waight Keller, who is English, asked terribly politely. The model walked back and forth across the fitting room. And then she did it again, and again. Something about all those pleats just wasn’t falling right. Being a fitting model generally calls more for stillness than exertion, but here, the model was back and forth all afternoon, as Waight Keller scrutinized each piece to make sure the flou—the French term for the whole category of skimpy, flowy fabrics—had the proper flounce. It turns out, inventing insouciance is painstaking work.
“Chloé is so much about movement. It’s so much about the feel of something,” says Waight Keller, 45, who joined Chloé nearly five years ago from Pringle of Scotland. “When I came to Paris, I hadn’t worked a lot with flou because it’s an extremely difficult fabrication to work with if you can’t physically move and drape in three dimensions.
“I had always worked in systems where you hand over a sketch and technical details, send it away and wait for it to come back. A flat sketch doesn’t describe the volume you’re talking about, the cuts you’re talking about and the drape you’re talking about. At Gucci, we used to sketch flou-y dresses, and when they came back, you’d just go, ‘Oh God, that’s so bad.’ Working with an atelier down the hall is a huge advantage. I can say, ‘Cut this in five different fabrics.’ You need to test it constantly, to refine it constantly.”
It’s clear that when it comes to Chloé and Clare Waight Keller, the flou fits. For one thing, Waight Keller walks and talks like a quintessential Chloé girl herself: porcelain skin, thick brown hair hanging loose, jeans and a man’s button-down, and an unruffled, “I’m OK, thanks” vibe. She’s easy in her sneakers, as the French say. You want to hang with her the same way you would want to hang with Chloé clients like, say, Jane Birkin or Marianne Faithfull (who was perhaps at her most Chloé when confronted by the cops at Keith Richards’s house in 1967, clad only in a fur rug. “I’ve always thought women look better naked,” said Gaby Aghion, Chloé’s founder).
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I met with Waight Keller at her cavernous apartment just off the Bois de Boulogne in Paris’s 16th arrondissement. It took her a while to get used to all those grand Haussmannian rooms strung out end to end—her 4-year-old son, Harrison, loves making endless loops around them on his scooter. (She and her architect husband, Philip Keller, also have twin girls, Amelia and Charlotte, 13.) “I don’t think I’ll ever live in something this size again,” she says, sounding wistful for the small farmhouse by the sea in Cornwall where she loves to escape.
The apartment is a welcoming, unfussy space, filled with odd things picked up casually along her way—her grandmother’s lamp; a funny photograph of pubic hair with a marmoset by Ryan McGinley (he shot ads and a film for Pringle of Scotland when Waight Keller was its creative director); a huge map of New York from when she lived there (“I got lost in the West Village so many times”); another photograph of painting-palette tests by the artist Jenny Saville (“We collaborated on a scarf based on these tests, so this was quite precious”). Everywhere there are chairs, which she just can’t stop herself from buying. And in front of Waight Keller’s bedroom fireplace stands a phalanx of her shoes (“All good girls should have a shoe fireplace”).
Nothing about the apartment feels as though it’s straining for effect, which, as it happens, is a bedrock principle of Chloé girlism. The kitchen is a huge, bright room, with a big, heavy-legged wooden table that encourages sitting around, and that’s what Waight Keller had in mind when she moved the kitchen to what had been the apartment’s dining room.
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She’s got a different favorite spot for solitary sitting around. It’s one of those small corner rooms that are frequently found in old Paris apartments, its high portes-fenêtres facing south and west. “I end up being in here a lot, sitting on the sofa and slogging through things,” she says. “You get sunlight all afternoon here, and it makes such lovely shadows. I love looking out the window at the moldings on buildings across the street. It just feels so Paris to me.”
It may not be a house rule that Chloé’s designer must be a Chloé girl, but it clearly helps. The way Chloé works, and has always worked, is to build the brand around the imagined persona of its emblematic customer. For this summer, Waight Keller rummaged through the wardrobe of the ’90s and pulled out a pair of track pants. Just because. “I was thinking, I’ve done big flare, and I’m sick of wearing my boyfriend jeans, so what do I want to wear now?”
Chloé makes much of the fact that it has no curlicue C logo or other branding iron to stamp its product and, by extension, its clientele. It doesn’t pay celebrities to show up in the camera’s crosshairs at its runway shows, says Geoffroy de la Bourdonnaye, a former Disney executive who joined Chloé as chief executive the year before Waight Keller arrived. Instead the brand relies on the influence of the brigade of fresh-faced Chloé devotees who fill the front row. “We are not a brand that screams,” he likes to say.
That makes for a tricky balancing act, however. Waight Keller’s designs must project a precise idea of who the Chloé girl is without defining her so narrowly that all the not-Chloé girls of the world feel rejected. Richemont, the brand’s owner, has big plans for Chloé, and they don’t include playing haberdasher to a ya-ya sisterhood of insiders. (Richemont doesn’t release Chloé’s annual sales, but Exane BNP Paribas analyst Luca Solca guesses $300 million.) De la Bourdonnaye would even let Kim Kardashian, arguably the world’s un-Chloé-iest person, join the club. “I wouldn’t want to say she’s not a Chloé girl—anybody can be a Chloé girl,” de la Bourdonnaye says expansively.
Waight Keller has managed to thread this needle deftly by taking herself and what she wants to wear as her starting point, rather than a bunch of disembodied adjectives. She designs clothes first and fashion second. “Women need to desire clothing, so even when I’m in fittings, I think, Would I want to wear that?” Waight Keller says. “It’s at the heart of what I work on every day. That for me is the trigger point that makes it real, instead of just something for a shoot. It’s something you really want in your wardrobe because you know it’s going to make you feel great. I think it’s harder to feel that if you’re a male designer. I have a couple of guys on my team, and I’m always having to challenge them. They’ll say, ‘Oh, this looks really Chloé!’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, but I don’t want to wear that right now.’ ”
This corresponds to the spirit of Gaby Aghion, who created the brand in 1952. Gaby and her husband, Raymond Aghion, arrived in Paris from Alexandria, Egypt, just after the war. They quickly fell in with the smart set at the Café de Flore on the Left Bank. Haute couture had its mailing address on the Right Bank, where Christian Dior, Jacques Fath, Balenciaga and Schiaparelli had been cutting and sewing during the Nazi occupation.
Aghion had a strong sense of style, not to mention a fair amount of money (her husband’s family was in the cotton exporting business). She bought a few Balenciagas and a few Diors. But she couldn’t afford to dress that way all the time—who could?—and besides, she didn’t want to. She discovered to her dismay that there really wasn’t much else in the way of stylish, well-tailored clothing. It simply didn’t exist.
‘You’re thinking, Oh God, do I need another tight skirt? It’s about adaptability—understanding the flow of fashion.’
Shortly before her death in 2014, Aghion recalled how she pretty much conjured prêt-à-porter out of thin air. “One morning, I woke up thinking, ‘I will make a little collection of charming dresses in very pretty colors that women will fancy.’... I designed six dresses, hired seamstresses with haute-couture training, borrowed a friend’s name, Chloé—which I liked for the roundness of its letters—and hand-painted the label with one of my artist friends; I wanted it to be amusing. I then decided to personally propose this collection to boutiques. I was sticking my neck out. I was a client; I became a saleswoman. I had sass, I was light-hearted, and I had a hell of a lot of nerve!” she wrote in the 2013 book Chloé: Attitudes.
Over the years, Chloé’s choice of designers, both under Aghion and since 1985 under what is now Richemont, has been astute. Aghion handpicked a pre-Chanel Karl Lagerfeld in the mid-’60s, and the two developed a warm working relationship. The Chloé girl remained in sure, sisterly hands under Stella McCartney and Phoebe Philo, who was McCartney’s design assistant before taking over in 2001. And then, for a few years after Philo left in 2006, Chloé stumbled.
ENTER WAIGHT KELLER, whose disjointed résumé makes her oddly well suited to lead Chloé at a time when bigger things are expected of it. Early on, she picked up the artisanal chops needed to elevate everyday-wear to something finer. When she was growing up, her mother hand-stitched the family’s clothes in their modest Birmingham home. “That’s one of my first memories: standing there and my mother saying, ‘Don’t move, don’t move, I’m going to pin you, don’t move!’ ” she says. “Then, as my sister and I got older, we had to become her helpers. She hated how I pinned patterns because I’d make too much of a bubble in the fabric—little, subtle things that I didn’t realize at the time became second nature when I got to school. When they tell me now that something is labor-intensive, I’m like, Really?”
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After graduating from London’s Royal College of Art with a master’s in fashion knitwear, she was thrown into the hurly-burly of ’90s New York as a designer for Calvin Klein. It was the ideal place to acquire some armor plating. “I’d never seen a cockroach in my life,” Waight Keller says, laughing. “Calvin Klein was a little dry on the design side, but you suddenly went Voom! to something very commercial. It’s about being sure you shift the big numbers. That kind of hard-core, brutal start makes you really tough really quick.”
At Ralph Lauren’s luxurious Purple Label, she got essentially a doctorate in detailing and construction. “Everything is in the detail. Ralph works in millimeters. A lot of people say, ‘Oh, it’s an old-fashioned look,’ but there was a lot of depth to what he did, no matter what you see on the surface. He would say, ‘I only want shirts that have a 16-piece collar,’ and I’m like, Really? A collar can have 16 pieces?”
Perhaps the boot camp that best prepared Waight Keller for Chloé was the drilling under Tom Ford at Gucci, where she landed in 2000. This was Ford’s heyday at Gucci, when the brand’s image was so sharp and so seamless it looked laser-cut. Ford was responsible for that. “He’s extremely rigorous about things,” says Waight Keller. “That’s something that’s always been in the back of my mind at Chloé—making sure the message is very consistent. I’m the guardian of the brand.” She learned another lesson at Gucci, too: when to soften the hard-edged story line. “As much as I loved working with Tom, you get to a point where you feel a bit saturated with the look. You’re thinking, Oh God, do I need another tight skirt? It’s about adaptability—understanding the flow of fashion, which I try to sense intuitively all the time.”
If there was a bump along the way to Chloé, it may have been Paris itself, with its brittle codes and persnickety way of doing things. At first, it threw Waight Keller. “When you live here, you have a very different perception than most people’s romantic notion of Paris. It’s quite an uncompromising city; you have to fit your personal life to it, not the other way around. Sometimes you can be really irritated by it.”
But as she has throughout her unlikely journey here, Waight Keller adapted and ultimately thrived. She has learned to love the afternoon light from her corner study, where she flops on the sofa when she gets back from the studio. She walks Harrison to school every morning and plays tennis with the twins every weekend in the Bois de Boulogne, just across the street. The butcher says bonjour now. She’s made Paris work for her. At Chloé, she has turned Paris’s insular, uncompromising standards to her advantage, too. “It’s allowed me to work with fabrics I’ve never worked with before, like lace. Lace has since become a huge part of my signature. For me, that’s quite empowering,” she says. “In the beginning, somebody in the atelier told me, ‘We don’t care what’s going on elsewhere; Paris only competes with itself.’ I think that’s what makes Paris the strongest and most creative city in many ways. There are things that are frustrating, but then you change what works for you.”
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