‘Creativity Has to Drive Every Decision’: Chloé Creative Director Natacha Ramsay-Levi on How the Values of Art Guide Her Design Philosophy

Natacha Ramsay-Levi, the
creative director of Chloé, has long supported the work of
independent artists, pulling them into the sweetly bohemian world
of the heritage French house for collaborations that have imbued
her collections with bold patterns, dazzling prints, and, as
fashion critic Tim Blanks noted during her debut show, “a slightly
eerie edge.”

In the three years since she
joined the house, Ramsay-Levi has continued to explore the bounds
of fashion through adjacent creative forms, incorporating nods to
the visual arts, cinema, literature, and dance.

We recently spoke to the
designer about why she enjoys working with creatives across
disciplines, what defines a successful art-fashion collaboration,
and her broader predictions for the future of Chloé as
the industry adapts to
a new reality.

What drew you to Chloé as a
house? 

It’s funny because though I love
style, to me, Chloé is a brand that exists a little outside of
fashion in the sense that it’s not a house in which you expect
things to be reinvented all the time. It’s a brand that talks about
the zeitgeist, to some extent, but through its particular attitude
and sensibility. I joined the house because it gathers many values
and inspirations that I felt connected to. The Chloé sensibility is
a way of being in the world, and it represents the spirit of the
kind of woman that I feel close to. And Chloé gave me the
opportunity to work with artists who I have loved and followed for
years. 

You’ve worked with several visual artists at Chloé, from Rita
Ackermann to Rithika Merchant to Marion Verboom. You’ve also worked
with other creatives, like musician Marianne Faithfull. In a sense,
these collaborations have become part of your indelible mark as
creative director there. Why bring in art and
artists? 

The work of a creative director
is different now than it used to be—before we were called
“designers,” which I think meant something much more singular. Now
there’s a slightly broader interpretation of what we’re expected to
do that’s a little more abstract. It’s about trying to be faithful
to the house and its heritage while also reinterpreting what it
means in the context of the present day, beyond just the clothes,
and paying mind to evolution. It’s about exploring your creative
spirit, too, and how that keys into the identity of a fashion
brand, even if it’s as strong as Chloé’s, in order to continue to
grow it beyond what the public knows it to be. 

Working with artists brings
another layer of creativity to the house. It brings dialogue, it
brings direction. It nourishes and revives the spirit of the house.
Selecting artists who share the same values as you is a way to
honor the house’s mission and ethos, but at the same time continue
its transformation. 

I always wanted these
collaborations to feel very authentic. It’s never about making a
collage of ideas hastily thrown together. I always start with the
central fashion idea and the message that I feel I want to convey,
and then while I’m designing, I might say, “Oh I need a print” or I
think of an artist that I admire who would be great to be able to
help me answer the questions of the moment that I’m attempting to
address in the collection.

It always starts with that seed
and then I try to find an artist who’s already exploring the same
ideas because I really believe that you shouldn’t ask an artist to
do something other than what he or she already does. With Rita, for
example, the paintings we used are from the ’90s and 2000s. It was
really this idea of dialogue between what she had done and what I
wanted to talk about at Chloé. I always wanted to be as responsible
and authentic as possible and we kept the work exactly the way it
was. With Rithika, it was a little different. I was searching for a
very specific kind of print that I wanted to use on the clothes—a
sort of esoteric message by which to channel a specific kind of
witch femininity, as I was interested in exploring the history of
ties between women and the occult. I found her paintings by chance
on Google. And then I contacted her and she made three really
special artworks for the dresses, and let us use two of her works
that she had already done. She came to the studio, she did all the
placement with me for each print and piece—it was a very
collaborative process.  

It’s nice to hear about how each of these collaborations came
to be because designers are often reticent about letting the public
in on their process, I think in part because there’s not always a
lot of there there. But for you there seems to be. 

When I approach an artist, I do
it with so much sincerity. I think the hardest thing is first to be
able to come to an artist and tell them very clearly what you see
and what you need and what you feel would be great—to translate
that initial idea. And the moment the artist says “yes,” you have
to be open to what they bring, even if it might ultimately differ
from the vision that you had. it’s really about your understanding
and comprehension of the art before you can even think about
collaboration. You have to have a reason for why you want to do it.
And if you have that reason and understanding of their work, it has
a chance to be really organic and maybe really good.

What works of art have been seminal to your development not
only as a creator, but as a person more generally? 

That’s a difficult one [laughs].
The first striking moment for me was from cinema. A lot of New Wave
cinema was a total revelation to me. I would say works by Louise
Bourgeois and Rodin and then Marguerite Duras. The list goes on and
there are too many people to name, but I would say it’s mostly been
artists who sort of dwell on and dig into their own
vulnerability. 

The luxury business has begun collaborating with independent
artists more and more these days. What do you make of this
trend? 

It’s funny because I don’t
really feel this newness, in the sense that it’s been happening for
a long time. I feel it’s always been there, that art-fashion
collaboration idea… think of Helmut Lang and Louise Bourgeois, or
Nicolas Ghesquière and Cindy Sherman. I feel like this all started
a long time ago in interesting ways, but indeed it recently became
more systematic and in certain ways, less interesting, no? I
think collaboration can be a good thing, as long as it’s not too
opportunistic and sometimes when I see collaborations these days,
like it’s just two big giants putting things together for the sake
of their combined “giantness.” I don’t always understand the
point.

Right. So what then makes a collaboration successful, in your
view?

I think in a way, to me, it
doesn’t really matter if you classify it as art or fashion or
something else. It should make you have an emotional reaction, and
it should feel like a point of dialogue. It’s like the feeling you
get if you had a really great conversation with someone or what
happens to you when you close a great book or were deeply moved by
a film. It’s kind of the opposite of, “What is it?” I think
it needs
to be complex to define, but
nonetheless you can tell it’s something between two spirits that’s
working. It’s about how much it can push the line between the
boundaries of mediums, and I think it becomes a bit magical or
special in that way, when it’s done right. I think about this kind
of creative community, which is beautiful—and I think artists in
general collaborate in their own field, so why not translate that
from one field to the other? I must say that something that
creatives are much more interested than a splashy product is
cultivating a creative or spiritual family of sorts that enables us
to recognize and question ourselves and our own creativity. I think
the point of a good collaboration allows us to push further in that
quest to really say exactly what it is we’re trying to
say.  

What art, if any, do you keep at home or at your
atelier? 

I don’t have much art of my own,
I must admit. I never started collecting seriously. I have a few
pieces, one by one of my best friends, Ligia Dias, she’s a jewelry
designer who’s very much from the art world. So I’ve got a few
pieces from her, and one from Liz Craft, but mostly I love
furniture design. As much as I love it, if I had to buy art, I
wouldn’t know where to start and, in a way, I don’t feel the need
to possess it. It’s not something I need to have, though of course I would love it, but I don’t
see it as decoration for my walls. It’s something
bigger. 

How are you personally handling everything right now? How has
life changed, and how have you adapted your daily routine during
the present shutdown? 

I think the first thing that
this has confirmed, hopefully for all of us, is the importance of
humility. And that’s not a bad value to have. I think there’s a
certain humility to daily life now for all of us, because you’re at
home and you have to take care of everything—not just your work,
but your cleaning and cooking. On another level, I think it also
requires humility to accept this change as part of the world we’re
inhabiting right now. To say “Okay, everything is changing, I’m
trying to think, I’m trying to gather all the information for what
we’ll need down the line, and trying to think actively about the
destination we want to get to.” To me, it’s really about the
humility of being able to embrace the unknown and that, I would
say, has defined a lot of my day-to-day right now.

Are you designing right now? Are you able to work on
collections from home or is that not even something you’re doing as
yet? 

A little bit, but I don’t have a
lot of time because, you know, it’s a big house. There are other
issues to think about right now. There’s a lot of
management-related conversations, and it’s a great moment for me to
think about changing the way we do things. So I’ve been doing much
more thinking about how we’ll build the new collections moving
forward, what our results will aim to look like, what we value, and
how we’re going to prioritize creativity. 

One thing I’ve been thinking
about a lot is how we give space to our creativity, which is of
course the center of our business. Over time and through the rush
of the economy in the digital age, it became less considered and I
think that now we all agree that it has to be back at the center of
the fashion conversation. Creativity has to drive every decision,
and we need to be more careful about ensuring that it does that. We
also need to think about how to be more sustainable, which is no
small thing. So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about all of this
and writing to my colleagues and reading about
strategy. 

There’s been a lot of conversation about the reckoning the
fashion world is going through in the wake of all this. Some
designers have voiced that they are reconsidering the harried ways
in which they work, and it seems like it all comes down to the
fashion calendar and the miserable pace of the shows. Do we need so
many shows every year, so many collections? 

I have a lot of thoughts about
this [laughs]. To me, the show schedule took on a life of its own
at some point and it became something where it’s hard to answer the
question of, “Why is this happening?” You couldn’t answer that
question if you tried. Now is the right moment to
reassess.

I think the major problem of the
fashion calendar, again, is that it doesn’t value creativity. We do
two collections a season, like most houses, and then we show one,
but the one we show is really the smallest one in terms of business
because it’s delivered pretty late to the shops and then the sales
and the markdowns come very, very early. I think that the first
move that has to happen is to stop the markdowns altogether. I
think we are an industry of luxury, but also art—you’ve never seen
a painting go on sale after six months, right? It doesn’t happen.
So it’s pretty crazy. For us, a piece of clothing can come into the
boutique and stay only two months, and after two months it’s marked
down. 

I think the point here is to
rethink everything from the creative point of view, and realize
that the creative point of view is the fashion show. And then we can discuss the
medium after that: Is it a real fashion show or a digital one? And when will it
happen?

For Chloé, in September, there
will not be a real fashion show, in the traditional sense. But for
me it would be a great opportunity to work with visual artists and
dancers and other people to remake the idea of show, because even
the show in itself is kind of weird to think about these days—a
woman walking without being able to show her femininity, it was a
bit random, in a way, as a premise.

So, to me, it’s two things that
need to change: first, the role of creative people to be inventive
and to be collaborative in the way we show things, and second, the
role of the fashion industry to give us space and time to the
develop the right products. We need to produce with sustainability
in mind, and then those clothes have to have time on the floor
without being marked down. And I think as soon as we achieve that,
we might be in a world where we have less waste.

I hear a lot of voices already
starting to articulate those things. I believe in the fashion
industry. It’s an industry that works with and not against the
zeitgeist, and sometimes that means that we’re one of the fastest
to adapt. We can move very quickly. And I hope that we can move
in the ways it counts now. 

The post ‘Creativity Has to Drive Every Decision’: Chloé
Creative Director Natacha Ramsay-Levi on How the Values of Art
Guide Her Design Philosophy appeared first on artnet
News.