Chloé Winter 2025 Ad Campaign

Review of Chloé Winter 2025 Ad Campaign by Creative Director & Photographer David Sims with model Grace Hartzel

Chloé’s Winter 2025 campaign, photographed by David Sims and starring Grace Hartzel, takes us to the South of France, its Belle Époque setting layered with a reference to Villa Nellcôte, that 1970s enclave of decadence and creativity. Under Chemena Kamali’s creative direction, the house leans into a narrative of escape—sun-faded grandeur, untamed sensuality, and the off-season hush of the Riviera. If past Chloé campaigns have sometimes felt like a free-spirited postcard, this one reads more like the opening frames of a film, heavy with atmosphere and intent.

The imagery is undeniably cinematic. Hartzel wanders through villas and gardens, framed by stone balustrades, gilded chairs, and dappled sunlight that feels both tender and unforgiving. There is a looseness to the posing, an impression of a character who has simply stepped into the scene rather than been placed there. The clothes, with their ruffles, fur, and soft tailoring, carry the lived-in glamour of a wardrobe worn for pleasure rather than presentation. These choices give the campaign an alluring tension between restraint and abandon, presence and escape—the duality at the heart of Kamali’s vision.

Conceptually, the reference to Nellcôte is clever. It calls to mind the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. sessions, with all their mythos of hedonism and artistic chaos, yet Kamali filters that lore through a lens of Chloé femininity. There is less grit, more dream—an evocation of freedom without descending into pastiche.

The campaign’s strength lies in how it positions Chloé’s storytelling. Kamali is not simply chasing a mood; she is aligning the house with an idea of womanhood that is free-spirited but not naïve, sensual but not staged, rooted in history yet unafraid of imperfection. Grace Hartzel is a fitting vessel here—her gaze is neither coy nor overly polished, suggesting instead a woman caught between freedom and self-possession, a character who belongs to the present even as she haunts the past.

Sims’ photography, with its grain and glow, captures that elusive balance of nostalgia and immediacy; Elodie David’s styling, Esther Langham’s hair, and Hiromi Ueda’s makeup all lean into textures that feel lived-in rather than lacquered. Poppy Bartlett’s set design frames the Belle Époque villa with just the right balance of grandeur and intimacy, while Konstantin Wehrum’s music supervision layers in an added note of atmosphere. Kamali’s direction grounds the campaign with a clear sense of narrative intention, and together they succeed in making the viewer feel as if they’ve stumbled into a scene already in progress, which is no small feat.

As with any strong Chloé campaign, the question is not whether it dazzles but whether it endures. Kamali’s Winter 2025 effort may not shock the eye, but it lingers in the imagination like a half-remembered melody. In the spirit of Nellcôte’s mythology, it suggests that freedom and mystery are not things to be announced, but atmospheres to be inhabited. And in an age when fashion so often clamors for attention, Chloé’s choice to invite us quietly into its dream may be its most rebellious act of all.