Yahoo Sports Gabriela Hearst Is Leaving Chloé After Three Years at the Brand
Gabriela Hearst will exit Chloé after three years at the helm of the brand. Her first collection for the Maison was presented in March 2021, and her last will be the spring/summer 2024 collection, to be presented this fall on September 28 at Paris Fashion week. According to reports, she wants to focus on her eponymous brand and other ongoing projects.
In 2020, shortly before Hearst joined, Chloé shifted to a purpose-driven business model focusing on social and environmental sustainability. Nearly one year later, in October 2021, the Richemont-owned brand became the first European luxury house to receive B Corp status.
Hearst felt like a natural fit for the leadership role, given her interest in sustainability for her signature line. Gabriela Hearst bags are only produced in limited qualities, and back in 2018, she staged the first carbon-neutral fashion show during New York Fashion Week, with 25 percent of her collections made from dead stock material. On the Gabriela Hearst website, she writes, "I always tell my clients, 'Do not buy a lot, buy what you need, what you want, what you want to pass down.'" She often says her intention was to build a brand that had things that were made to last.
In joining Chloé, Hearst aimed to implement her values and developments on a larger scale. A statement following her first collection for the house claimed that it had "four times more lower impact materials" than the previous year. The denim was organic, the polyester and viscose were recycled, the bags were vintage. She would go on to design the popular low-impact Nama stitch sneaker, and continued to introduce recycled and upcycled fabrics into every collection. Her impact on the bottomline was notable, too: Last February Hearst and Chloé CEO Riccardo Bellini reported that revenue for the house had risen 60 percent.
There is no known succession plan currently, but the brand does have the attention of a younger generation of fashion fans, many of whom collect pieces from Stella McCartney's short stint at Chloé from 1997 to 2001. Last summer, New York-based vintage store James Veloria hosted a sale of archival pieces from the McCartney Chloé era, opening to a line that wrapped around the block. They stocked over one hundred pieces, all of which sold out. Resale sites like The Real Real have seen a renewed interest in some of Chloé's biggest "It" bags, like the Paddington and the Silverado, both ever-present in paparazzi shots from the early 2000s. While sustainability will no doubt remain at the forefront of the brand, it will be interesting to see if, with its next creative director appointment, Chloé can tap into the hype that surrounds its previous iterations.
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