With Chloé’s Exhibition launch in Paris, they have also come out with their Alphabet. Alongside 24 other bloggers, I was awarded a letter – mine was the letter R.

What is R you might ask and what does it mean?

The R stands for Rachmaninoff.

Sergei Rachmaninoff was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor widely considered one of the finest of his day. But this isn’t Rachmaninoff’s story – it’s Gaby Aghion’s, founder of Chloé.

Being the arty, intellectual that she is, Gaby Aghion created a unique naming convention for her collections and the items within each. And it was inspired by the likes of Rachmaninoff…

Rejecting the contemporary practice of numbering collections with the year and season they were released, she instead used culturalreferences to name her collections. From the outset, each individual piece was named after something or someone significant –painters, poets, composers.

Later in the 50’s, Gaby went further. Using the alphabet, she started with “A” and each collection was themed around the next letter from then on. By 1972, she had got to the letter R – with designs named after the likes of Rachmaninoff, Rivabella, Rilke and Routier…

Names came from a vast collection of reference points and could come from anywhere: nature, a new place she had taken a trip to, or culture she has just discovered.

It’s this naming tradition that has inspired the structure of our 60-year heritage digital celebrations. It’s not a chronology, instead a thematic path through key moments of the very best of Chloé’s creativity, pausing at key moments within history, all framed by letters of the alphabet.

Check out the rest of the Alphabet here