The Alphabet – celebrating 60 years of Chloé

Chloé, the luxury and ultra-feminine fashion label, turns 60 years young this September. From its Parisian inception in 1952, it has built an enviable legacy of luxury ‘Prêt-à-Porter’.

To mark the occasion, Chloé.Attitudes is an exhibition at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, celebrating Chloé’s 60-year contribution to fashion culture.

After a competitive pitch, Chloé commissioned Guided to deliver a digital heritage experience, designed to coincide with the Chloé.Attitudes exhibition and extend its reach.

In response, Guided created ‘The Alphabet’: a digital exploration of the Chloé heritage, available across the world in 6 languages on computers, smartphones and tablets. ‘The Alphabet’ aims to lay down an engaging precedent for the Chloé brand in the digital landscape. A playful and immersive experience, it is sure to paint a picture of Chloé that is both familiar and yet unexpected, and above all, imaginative and compelling.

‘The Alphabet’ is inspired by Chloé founder, Gaby Aghion’s, own creative process for naming her collections and garments. Finding numbers impersonal, she switched to letters, and the alphabet. From 1958, Collection ‘A’ was first, with every item in it given a name beginning with ‘A’. Then came ‘B’ and so on…

Launching on 27th September and running until 14th November, each letter of ‘The Alphabet’ has been assigned a theme, individually telling a fragment of the story; collectively forming a mosaic of Chloé’s iconic moments, inspirations and heritage. These 26 themes will be brought to life via film and documentaries, previously unseen archive imagery, past advertising, music, interactive and editorial, with the entire array to be made available at chloe.com/alphabet

To kick things off, ‘The Alphabet’ launched with 5 original short films and animations created by a stellar, all-female directing cast – Poppy De Villeneuve, Julie Verhoeven, Kathryn Ferguson, Stéphanie Di Giusto and Mary Clerté – who have each interpreted one of five principal letters / themes that happen to spell out the name C.H.L.O.É. These films – which you can see below – explore themes of Counter-Couture, Horses, Light, O (roundness) and Embroidery. They were released exclusively and simultaneously via five high profile fashion bloggers from the UK, USA, France, Japan and China.

Subsequent letters and themes will be released every other day via global fashion bloggers until the physical exhibition closes its doors.

It is early days in this mammoth 2 month project, so check back to see more content unfold; images of the bespoke boxes of content each blogger receives; and the results – which, at the time of writing, are looking positive with coverage appearing across the likes of Vogue, Elle, Harpers and Another Mag to name just a few.