The British woman who really knows what other women want to wear

The creative director at Chloé knows women are too busy to obsess over their wardrobe. She just makes clothes you have to have (and that the high street copies)

It is first thing on a Monday and in front of me sits a woman who is dressed like you or I might be only much, much better. A quietly cool perfection of super-fine wool collarless coat plus peg trousers with a raised pleat instead of a crease (both black), thick white T-shirt and zeitgeist strands of gold around her neck, wrists and fingers. It’s all gorgeous stealth detailing and incredible quality; above all, it’s easy-looking and ineffably — forgive me — “now”.

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I would expect nothing less. Clare Waight Keller is the creative director at Chloé, and Chloé is the French house that makes clothes that you and I want to wear. We may be buying them at Chloé, or we may (more likely) be buying low-rent versions of them at Zara — there is no brand more Zara-fied, on which more later — but every season she nails what women, real women, want to wear.

As the Birmingham-born 46-year-old designer puts it, over a cup of very English-looking milky tea at the Wolseley restaurant in London, “Chloé is known as a place to go to buy things. It’s not one of those houses that produces things which you just go and look at, like museum pieces.”

She is right. What always strikes me during fashion month, when I travel from New York to Paris by way of London and Milan, all the while looking at clothes, clothes, clothes, is how few things I see that I would actually want to wear. Visit the Chloé showroom, however, and it is full of what look like the best ever variants of things already on my rails. I know that if I were to own them, rather than the pale comparisons in my possession, my life would be better somehow. “It’s a conscious decision for me to make things that feel like they are a part of your wardrobe before you have even bought them,” Waight Keller says.

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 What do women want from fashion today, I ask. “Solutions,” is her sensible reply. Of course they do. Yet most designers would answer that question very differently. (Most designers, let’s remember, are men.) “Women want something ultra-desirable,” she continues, “but we are too busy to be standing in front of a mirror going, ‘Oh God, I don’t have the right shoe to go with this skirt.’ I want Chloé to be an accessible styling asset.”

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