Chloe Women's Fashion Brand

Chloe is a French luxury fashion house founded in 1952 by Gaby Aghion. The founding was a market revolution: prior to Chloe's launch, luxury fashion houses had only ever produced Haute Couture - made-to-measure clothing. That was fine for the few who could afford it, but it left everyone else in frequently poorly-made copies, supplied by the local seamstress. Between the couture salon and the seamstress's copy, Aghion saw the gap the whole modern industry now lives in.

Gaby Aghion, rejecting the stiff formality of 1950s fashion and sensing that gap in the market, decided to create a line of off the rack, high quality, soft, body conscious clothes from fine fabrics, which she called 'luxury pret-a-porter' - and thus, the Pret-a-Porter, or Ready-To-Wear, market we know today, was born. Aghion later joined forces with Jacques Lenoir in 1953, formally managing the business side of the brand, allowing Aghion to purely pursue the creative growth of Chloe: the classic founder pairing, a creative and a manager, one year into the house's life.

Luxury Pret-a-Porter: The Idea That Won

Every phrase in that founding sentence is a design instruction. Off the rack meant a woman could buy luxury the day she saw it. High quality and fine fabrics meant the rack compromised nothing that mattered. Soft and body conscious, against the stiff formality of the 1950s, meant the clothes moved with the woman wearing them rather than armoring her. Ready-to-wear as the world knows it - designer clothes, made in sizes, sold in stores - starts here as a named idea, and Chloe's women's range of clothing, handbags, shoes and accessories still trades on it.

The two photographs in this page's gallery - the house's fashion imagery and its handbags - show the modern form of the idea: softness as luxury, femininity without stiffness. For a shopper, that heritage sets the standard to judge by. A Chloe piece should feel like the founding promise: fabric with a fine hand, a cut that follows the body kindly, and finishing that belongs to a luxury house even though the garment was bought off the rack.

Buying Chloe Well

Start with the handbags and the dresses, the categories where the house's soft-luxury language speaks clearest, and judge them in the hand: leather should be supple rather than boardy, hardware finished without roughness, linings as considered as the outside. In clothing, try your size and the one beside it - body conscious is a fit philosophy, not a squeeze, and the right size drapes where the wrong one pulls. As with every widely desired luxury name, buy through the house, authorised retailers, or documented resale, and treat an implausible price as a warning.

Care follows the fine-fabric rule the founder built on: specialist cleaning for structured and delicate pieces, soft storage for leather goods away from anything that can press a mark into them, and shoes rested and tree'd between wears. Kept properly, a Chloe piece holds the quality that made its category exist. When you visit Chloe's world, you discover the latest designer clothes, bags, fragrances and accessories from the luxury Paris fashion Maison - a maison that began by insisting luxury could be soft, ready, and worn the same day.

Photos