The Woman Who Founded Chloé: An Exhibition at the Jewish Museum Celebrates Gaby Aghion’s Enduring Spirit

Chemena Kamali was named Chloé’s new creative director yesterday. The 41-year-old German designer joins a long list of mostly female heads of the label since its founding by Gaby Aghion in Paris in 1952. All eyes will be on Kamali’s debut for the house in January, when she’s scheduled to present her pre-fall collection during the haute couture shows.

But first a new exhibition opening at the Jewish Museum in New York this week is showcasing the work of her predecessors. “Mood of the Moment: Gaby Aghion and the House of Chloé” features 150 garments, two-thirds of which are displayed not on mannequins but on hangers, the better to convey their uncomplicated construction and lightness. Many have occupied the top spot at Chloé—from Karl Lagerfeld, who held the creative director role for 25 years during two different periods, to Martine Sitbon, Stella McCartney, Phoebe Philo, Hannah MacGibbon, Clare Waight Keller, Natacha Ramsay-Levi, and Gabriela Hearst—but its aesthetic was set by Aghion, who rejected the stiff, often heavy made-to-measure clothes of the Parisian couturiers of her era for easier wearing designs.

Yves Saint Laurent is often credited with inventing ready-to-wear with the launch of Rive Gauche in 1966. Aghion beat him to the luxury prêt-à-porter concept by almost a decade-and-a-half. An Egyptian emigré, Aghion’s Paris circle included Left Bank artists, writers, and academics. “Her intellectual friends couldn’t afford haute couture. They had to wear copies of copies, what she once called ‘half-baked couture’,” says Geraldine Sommier, the Chloé archive director, who opened the archive’s doors to the exhibition’s guest curator Choghakate Kazarian. “Gaby offered an alternative. It wasn’t a more affordable copy, it was something that expressed a different spirit.”

Installation view of Mood of the moment: Gaby Aghion and the house of Chloé at the Jewish Museum, NY. Photo by Dario Lasagni. Image courtesy of the Jewish Museum.

Aghion hosted her fashion shows in the bohemian environs of the Quartier Latin boites she frequented, the Café de Flore included. It further separated her budding brand from the old world traditions of the haute couturiers, who held their shows in Right Bank salons. Another Aghion innovation was to insist that the boutiques that sold Chloé clothes retained the Chloé label at a time when it wasn’t unusual for stores to replace existing labels with their own. It’s no small part of why the brand Chloé exists to this day. “She was conscious that she was creating something with an identity and not only beautiful garments,” says Sommier. “There is, underground, an idea of participating in the evolution of the society of her time.”

Indeed, Aghion approached all aspects of her business with unconventionality. Rather than assigning her garments numbers, as was the custom at the time, she named them. One season, it would be painters of different time periods, another it would be French cities. “It was very playful,” says Sommier. Playful practicality is an apt way to describe what distinguished Aghion from her mostly male peers, what gave Chloé its “different spirit.” The exhibition’s curators capture it in the final section of the show, which displays 50 versions of the feminine silk blouse the color of Egyptian sand that Aghion wore every day, made by its many different designers.

“Mood of the Moment: Gaby Aghion and the House of Chloé” at the Jewish Museum opens to the public on October 13, 2023 and runs until February 18, 2024.