At Chloé, Sales Are Up, and the Designs Are Easy
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
HERE are certain fashion designers who see no shame in getting on a sales floor now and then. Some seem disarmingly well-suited to visiting department stores, pouring women prosecco and telling them how much better they look in magenta or in cap sleeves rather than spaghetti straps. Other designers consider the personal appearance an act of abasement, to which creative people should not fall. Still others cannot fathom that many women care so deeply about clothes that they wish to meet the people who make them.
Among those apparently mystified by the consumer habits of the well-to-do is Phoebe Philo, in her third year as the creative director at Chloé. Last week, Ms. Philo, who is English, arrived in New York to visit Bergdorf Goodman for her first trunk show, a ritual she regarded with the curiosity of someone first learning about the mating habits of rare Arctic creatures. "Where do all the clothes go?" she said, referring to the expensive purchases made by women who frequent trunk shows. "I mean where do they all end up — in a charity shop?"
Around her, personal shoppers were buzzing through the fall 2004 collection, full of $2,500 dresses, $1,600 handbags and $385 corduroy skirts, and placing orders for clients who may or may not someday sentence the garments to life in a hospital thrift store. "Shopping, really, I don't understand the inclination," Ms. Philo said.
In her heart of hearts, Ms. Philo, seems to believe that a woman can look perfectly attractive by assembling herself from whatever she might find among her grandmother's lace heirlooms or tossed aside on the floor of her boyfriend's closet, and it is this ethos that has made her tenure at Chloé a winning one. Sales at Chloé, which is owned by the luxury conglomerate Richemont, have gradually increased since Ms. Philo took over from her far better-known predecessor and former boss, Stella McCartney, said Ralph Toledano, Chloé's president. Sales shot up 40 percent for the 12 months ending in March, compared with the same period a year earlier. Of the 10 Chloé stores around the world, nine are now profitable, he said.
The store on Madison Avenue in New York is the only one lagging, a problem Mr. Toledano attributed to the city's astronomical rents. But the company has managed to cut the losses there during the past two years by 75 percent, he said.
Under Ms. McCartney's direction, Chloé veered too far from its whimsical essence. Ms. McCartney had a sense of humor, but one that expressed itself in bathing suits with images of pineapples and other fruit in anatomically inappropriate places.
The Chloé label began with a runway show at the Café de Flore in Paris in 1956, and embodied the understanding that a woman should never look as if she goes shopping — not for day clothes or weekend clothes, and most of all, certainly not for men. At 30, Ms. Philo speaks about her long-term boyfriend, Max Wigram, with whom she shares a town house in north London, as if she were a dreamy 16-year-old newly in the company of a cute senior. And this, as it happens, is probably how a head designer at Chloé should experience romance.
"Women have an emotional response to the clothes," said Jaqui Lividini, the fashion director of Saks Fifth Avenue, where Chloé sales have been healthy. "The line isn't something you buy because it fits into this or that part of your wardrobe."
If Ms. Philo's message is resonating at the moment it is perhaps because it isn't much of a message at all. Unlike, say, a Tom Ford, she does not attach her personal tastes to some larger ideology about the way women should comport themselves. She knows she is not a politician and that a feeling about chiffon is not a political platform. The new Chloé clothes seem increasingly appealing — a pair of goofily high-waisted jeans with a tucked-in blouse, a heavy wool coat tossed over a wisp of an evening dress, clunky wooden shoes with camel trousers — in part because they lack the vulgarity of an autocratic mind.
"When I wear something from Chloé — and I do often — whether it's a charm bracelet or a tunic, people will say, `Wow, did you get that at a flea market?' " said Sarah Easley, an owner of Kirna Zabête in SoHo, where the label under Ms. Philo's stewardship has done well. "And I say, well, no, but that's the idea."
"Phoebe's got a way of putting things together," Ms. Easley said, "where you can dress head to toe in Chloé and not look like you're trying too hard and that is very, very rare."
The daughter of an art dealer mother and a real-estate developer father, Ms. Philo, grew up in Harrow, a racially mixed London suburb, where hip-hop culture held sway on her sensibilities. "I had gold teeth," she said, "and I wanted to marry L.L. Cool J."
"We weren't ridiculously, crazily hedonistic as teenagers, but we were a bit off the wall," said Natalie Dean, a lifelong friend of Ms. Philo's. "We clubbed before the other kids. Phoebe had an older, richer boyfriend. She was the first in our circle to have a place in London at 18," Ms. Dean said. "She had the cool flat and the cool Beetle. She had the whole cool route down."
Part of that path included studying at Wimbledon School of Art before heading off to Central St. Martin's College of Art and Design in London, where she met and befriended Ms. McCartney, who took her to Chloé in 1997. "There was never a defining moment where I wanted to become a fashion designer," Ms. Philo said. "But I was always perched in a creative direction because academically I was weak."
In some sense, Ms. Philo has matured into her aesthetic, letting Chloé's air of butterflies-are-free Bohemia help define her. The clothes she produced as a student were very different from the ones she produces now. "I was very angry then," Ms. Philo said over lunch last week at the Maritime Hotel in downtown Manhattan, where she arrived wearing two slightly moth-eaten men's cashmere sweaters, one over the other. "I felt a very strong sense of competitiveness at St. Martin's," she said. "It was an intensely aggressive atmosphere, and what I found was that I was not a teacher's favorite in any way. I was aware that to get ahead you really had to fight for your place and your tutor's attention.
"And also I was 21 and so there were boy problems and parent problems, world problems and money problems," she said.
The choice to hire Ms. Philo at Chloé was a choice against the millennial wisdom that famous names provide an ineluctable allure to those who buy clothes. "When Stella left, I saw a lot of people, many of them well known," Mr. Toledano said. "But what I wanted was someone who understood the DNA of the brand and someone I could have a good partnership with.
"My goal is that Phoebe becomes a star, yes, but you become a star because you sell — you become a celebrity businessman because you make a lot of money," Mr. Toledano said.
And maybe you sell clothes when you don't tell women they should look like Nicole Kidman.
"Chloe's air of butterflies-are-free Bohemia" - maybe, but the clothes are pretty damn expensive, haha (what a perversion)...
i guess beauty is really in the eye of the beholder...
