Much has been written about the sudden might of Chemena Kamali’s Chloé, and its abilities to transform nice, inoffensive celebrities into It-girls: a clichéd term that magazines, like this one, have often used to describe famous but unknowable women who dress with moxie. The most obvious transformation has been that of Daisy Edgar-Jones. Big boho-ruffled maxi dresses, so-wrong-they’re-right kitten clogs and gargantuan hobo bags freed the actress from the prim, English rose thing that had been following her since starring as Normal People’s timid Marianne.
“It’s very much about an intuitive way of dressing,” Kamali herself has said of the Chloé girl. “I think there’s this longing for undone-ness and freedom and softness and movement.” Hers is a bohemian attitude stirred up from the collections Karl Lagerfeld produced for the house in the 1970s, when “people wanted to free themselves from conventions and traditional lifestyles”. It tracks, then, that Kamali’s first men’s look would debut on Timothée Chalamet, who plays Bob Dylan, a self-proclaimed “rolling stone”, emerging from the wilderness of New York’s beatnik scene in A Complete Unknown.
The actor was snapped at the Museum of Modern Art, dressed in a custom suede jacket of Kamali’s making – not dissimilar to the martial jackets once worn by Dylan – with hickory-striped Bape trousers, Red Wing boots and one geometric Cartier ring. He’s still sporting a strand of tricky little whiskers on his top lip, which in the context of his latest role, and Chemena Kamali’s broader universe, is not so much a symbol of masculine gruff as a bohemian coming of age.
