This month sees the French luxury fashion house Chloé unveil a new public space in Paris, with an exhibition of images by the seminal photographer Guy Bourdin.
Between 1956 and 1986 – when design was led first by the ready-to-wear label’s founder, Gaby Aghion, and then by Karl Lagerfeld – Bourdin shot images of its collections for campaigns and for magazines, most notably Vogue Paris. “It was incredible how Bourdin outnumbered any other photographer – by a mile,” says Judith Clark, the London-based curator of the exhibition.
The show, at the new five-storey Maison Chloé, adjacent to the brand’s headquarters, marks this collaboration with more than 100 photographs featuring Chloé garments shot through Bourdin’s cinematic, often surreal, sometimes sinister filter.
“It’s not about the dress, it’s about his story,” says Clark. “So many of his images are like film stills, and you feel that the dress is being used as a prop. It is a part of the story.”
A permanent exhibition in the space will feature an A to Z of Chloé, tracing the history of the brand’s heritage and its famous designers – including a run of four British women: Stella McCartney, Phoebe Philo, Hannah MacGibbon and Clare Waight Keller, who left earlier this year, to be replaced by the French designer Natacha Ramsay-Levi.
“In a digital world it’s become more important that there are moments and places where you can touch and feel what Chloé really means, to experience that spirit,” says Geoffroy de la Bourdonnaye, the company’s CEO. “We needed to give Chloé girls a house.”
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