Somewhere between the first oversized shell jutting from the sand and the last sun-bleached frame, the new Chloé à la Plage campaign does something most luxury advertising struggles to do: it makes you want to be somewhere else.
- Chloé à la Plage 2026, the second edition of the house’s annual high summer capsule series
- Apple Martin, 21, daughter of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin, in her first Chloé campaign
- Sun-bleached Mediterranean palette, oversized shells, washed cottons, embroidered separates, raffia accessories, and surrealist seaside staging
- A campaign that proves restraint, in a season of maximalist noise, is its own kind of power move
Chemena Kamali, who returned to Chloé as creative director in October 2023 after a formative tenure at Saint Laurent, has been spending her time at the house rebuilding something that had softened in the years before her arrival. Not just an aesthetic, but a point of view. Chloé at its best has always felt like the fashion house most honest about pleasure. Not the performative pleasure of a red-carpet gown, but the real kind: a woman in a cotton dress she loves, bare feet in warm sand, already halfway through her second afternoon. That specific mood is precisely what this campaign traffics in, and it does so with an expertise that makes it look effortless, which is its own considerable achievement.
Kamali herself described the collection as “an ode to a surreal summer fantasy,” adding: “Apple, with her radiance and timeless 美景, draws us into this feeling in the most natural way.” The quote reads less like press copy than like an accurate description of what the images actually deliver.
What David Sims Built on the Beach
Photographer David Sims, returning after shooting the inaugural à la Plage campaign in 2025, operates here with the confidence of someone who understands that the most interesting tension in fashion photography often lives between stillness and suggestion.
His frames have the quality of a memory reassembled. Warm light falls across washed cotton separates and lace trims. A raffia shoulder bag sits in the corner of a shot like something found at a local market rather than selected by a prop stylist. Apple Martin, barefoot in an ivory two-piece eyelet set or wrapped in gauzy florals, moves through the images with the slightly unhurried quality of someone who has not been told what time it is, and does not care to find out.
The key visual choice belongs to creative directors Charles Levai and Kevin Tekinel: the decision to populate the shoreline with magnified shells, surrealist props scaled up beyond natural proportion, rising from pale sand against a sky-blue expanse. It is a light touch of the uncanny in a campaign that otherwise traffics in warmth. The shells prevent the images from becoming mere 生活方式 photography and give the world a coded, dreamlike edge that rewards looking twice.
Stylist Elodie David Touboul keeps the clothing legible without underlining it. The garments include a floral printed bathing suit, embroidered separates, a branded raffia shoulder bag, and the ivory eyelet two-piece, each piece photographed with enough breathing room to register fully while remaining subordinate to the atmosphere. Hair by Paul Hanlon and makeup by Yadim stay consistent with the campaign’s commitment to sun-kissed understatement. Set design by Poppy Bartlett anchors the world with its sparse, sun-struck shoreline.
On Apple Martin: The Right Face at the Right Distance
Casting always communicates strategy, whether a house acknowledges that or not. For the inaugural à la Plage campaign, Chloé chose Claudia Schiffer — a name that carries the full weight of 1990s supermodel mythology. For the second edition, they have chosen Apple Martin, 21, fresh from her Vanderbilt University graduation, the daughter of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin.
The pairing of these two choices across consecutive seasons is not accidental. Schiffer brought legacy glamour; Martin brings something the industry has been hunting for with increasing desperation: organic cool with genuine cultural currency, untouched by overexposure. Her fashion résumé includes work with Self-Portrait and GapStudio, as well as editorial spreads with Perfect Magazine and Vogue — but this is her first campaign for a French house of this stature.
What makes the casting succeed is that Chloé never lets celebrity become the loudest thing in the room. Martin is absorbed into the campaign’s mood, less face and more feeling — a stand-in for a particular kind of youthful ease that the collection itself embodies.
What Kamali Is Building, Season by Season
Kamali has been making a consistent argument since she took the creative director chair. That argument runs, roughly, as follows: femininity is not fragility, softness is not weakness, and pleasure is a legitimate aesthetic position.
The à la Plage campaign is the summer chapter of that argument. Where the house’s ready-to-wear collections have explored these themes through embroidery, layering, and a recurring vocabulary of flowing silhouettes, the beach campaign strips everything back to its essential elements. Warm light. Natural texture. A woman who appears to be exactly where she wants to be.
In a season where many campaigns compete on spectacle, Chloé simply goes to the beach. The deliberate sparseness of Levai and Tekinel’s art direction — choosing atmosphere over accumulation — is what allows Sims’ photography to land.
The Chloé à la Plage 2026 campaign is not trying to be the most talked-about campaign of the season. It is trying to be the one you remember by August — the one that made you feel something specific about what summer can be when it is handled with real care. The combination of Sims’ warm lens, Levai and Tekinel’s surrealist sparseness, Kamali’s increasingly confident house vision, and a casting choice that refuses to overstate itself produces images that feel genuinely achieved.
时尚 advertising at its best communicates not just the clothes but the life they enable. This campaign does precisely that, quietly, without making you feel the effort behind it.
功劳
- Photographer: 戴维-希姆斯
- Creative Directors: Charles Levai and Kevin Tekinel
- Stylist: Elodie David Touboul
- 模型： Apple Martin
Images Courtesy of Chloé
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