Chloé: The bag bag ladies must have

It’s the age-old question that has women digging deeply into their souls and pausing long before answering: “Are you a bag or a shoe person?” Not that they can’t be both — in fact, many women are and even before allocating space for clothes, they allot precious closet real estate to bags and shoes.

Most women I know, however, if they had to pick just one would rather have the bag. Bag ladies know that feeling of passing by a store window, seeing a leather bag with distinctive style from the corner of their eye, and making a swift U-turn to look at it again, feel it in their hands and try it on their shoulder.

A bag can define a woman’s outfit. She can be wearing the simplest dress or the most casual jeans and shirt, but when paired with a striking bag slung casually over her shoulder or on her arm — voila! — the outfit is complete. 

Chloé, the French fashion house founded by Gaby Aghion in 1952, is famous for “it-bags” that Hollywood and fashion celebrities — and mere, mortal bag ladies — covet.

Under its new creative director, Clare Waight Keller, the spring-summer collection of Chloé just got a little more feminine. This is Keller’s first season for Chloé and for inspiration and mood, she looked at the Chloé Girl and discovered “a multitude of feminine personalities that define the brand.”

The British-born Keller says, “I looked at festival girls, girls on the street and David Bailey’s photos of Marie Helvin and Anjelica Huston on a beach, there’s a sense of feminine complicity, sensitivity and sunniness in this collection.”

Keller, of course, is referring to one of Vogue’s superstar photographers. Bailey married model Marie Helvin, one of the first models to be described as “super model,” when she was 19, while Huston — who started modeling as a teenager — became one of his muses. In what’s been described as “one of fashion’s great road trips,” taking photographer and model down the Riviera, Bailey photographed Huston in Corsica.

This season’s inspiration is not surprising at all. Keller once told a British newspaper that her favorite fashion era was the ‘60s and ‘70s, “when women were freed of the formal codes of the ‘50s.”

It’s the same fashion philosophy of Chloé founder Gaby Aghion when she “rejected the stiff formality of 1950s fashion and decided to create a line of off-the-rack, soft, body-conscious clothes from fine fabrics.” Thus started what she called “luxury pret-a-porter” or ready-to-wear. And the Chloe Girl was born.

Vogue quotes Keller as describing the Chloe Girl in terms of her attitude and spirit. “It’s very much looking to the future with the brand and trying to bring my point of view. There’s always that personal side I’m trying to capture.”

Keller joined Chloé as creative director in May 2011, succeeding Hannah MacGibbon, and before her Phoebi Philo and Stella McCartney. Her career trajectory has been described as nothing less than phenomenal. Keller completed her BA in Fashion at Ravenbourne College of Art and her MA in Fashion Knitwear at London’s Royal College of Art. 

Just weeks out of university, at only 21 years old, she began her career in Calvin Klein’s womenswear division, and four years later transferred to Ralph Lauren, where she worked closely with Lauren himself for the launching of the brand’s higher-end Purple Label for men.

Next, she worked with Tom Ford as part of his design team, which included Francesco Costa and Christopher Bailey, at Gucci’s design studio in London in 2000. Keller was hired on the spot and she stayed on at Gucci until Ford left in 2004. A year later, she was named creative director of Scotland’s Pringle, a heritage brand to which she gave a modern context and brought into the international fashion spotlight.

The spring-summer collection of Chloé has several new bag styles in neat constructions, which play on the softness of leather. A mini clutch with extra-wide strap, an oversized clutch, a new shoulder chain bag and a big tote in a large selection of beautiful textures, from sensual soft box leathers to very sophisticated exotics, enhanced by a siganture Chloé natural color palette with a twist in bright color accents.

For its overall spring-summer palette, Chloé gives in to powdery pastels, makeup shades with nudes and pinks and soft bright accents. Though Chloé’s bag division was started only in 2002 it has had a succession of “it-bags.” Its beloved Marcie bag (fans include Katie Holmes, Ellen Pompeo and Jessica Alba) and Paraty bag (seen on the shoulders or arms — it has top handles and a shoulder strap — of celebrities from Reese Witherspoon to Lindsay Lohan) continue to gain new following.

Its Paddington bag had one of modern fashion’s legendary debuts. For Chloé’s 2005 spring-summer bag collection, 8,000 Paddingtons were produced — and each and every single one sold out even before they made it to the store shelves.

That’s the stuff iconic bags are made of.    

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Chloe bags are available at Adora in Greenbelt 5.