‘I’ve at all times been very uncovered to this unusual state of alienation,’ says Nadège Vanhée, the inventive director of Hermès’ womenswear collections. After shifting to Antwerp to review on the Royal Academy of Fantastic Arts in her twenties – the varsity that had memorably birthed the Antwerp Six, amongst them Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck and Dries Van Noten – for the subsequent 15 years, she would largely reside exterior of her native France. First, there was a stint at Delvaux in Brussels, then Maison Martin Margiela in Paris, earlier than becoming a member of Phoebe Philo at Celine in London. In 2011, she moved to New York, changing into design director at Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s then-burgeoning label, The Row.
So the position at Hermès – one in every of France’s best-known luxurious exports and an emblem of Parisian type – marked one thing of a homecoming for Vanhée. However, as she sits amid objects from the home’s 16 métiers (there’s a ceramic eating set, trails of jewelry and, in fact, loads of purses) in Hermès’ sunlit showroom on Rue d’Anjou, she says that she nonetheless looks like one thing of an outsider in her dwelling nation. She calls English her ‘sentimental artistic language’. ‘I at all times really feel like I’ve been floating between the 2,’ she says.
Nadège Vanhée on ten years of womenswear at Hermès
Gilet, £8,200; trousers, £7,170; boots, £1,530, all by Hermès (enquire at hermes.com)
(Picture credit score: Images by Lucrezia Ganazzoli, style by Jason Hughes)
Vanhée was nonetheless in New York when she was approached for the job in 2014, taking on from Christophe Lemaire, who had left earlier that 12 months. ‘I felt a bit just like the final French particular person they might have chosen,’ she says. ‘Which was very nice.’ Returning to France from the US ‘felt nearly ecstatic’, although it was not at all times simple. ‘For the primary six months, I needed to realign myself with my Frenchness,’ she smiles. For his half, CEO Axel Dumas says she was the one particular person he approached for the job. The primary time they met, they mentioned Plato. She was employed not lengthy afterwards as one in every of Dumas’ first main appointments (a sixth-generation member of the Hermès-Dumas household, he started his place as sole CEO earlier in 2014).
‘It’s a steadiness between what I like and what I wish to discover – my obsessions, my emotions. What I wish to put on, sure, but in addition items that exit of my consolation zone’
Nadège Vanhée
This isn’t to say that Vanhée isn’t now at dwelling in her position, nor that she is blasé concerning the cultural significance of Hermès to the French populace (‘you’ve got the king, we’ve Hermès’). Relatively, her design philosophy is one in every of quiet rebel, teasing on the edges of what the Hermès girl might be, as usually solely an outsider can do. In some methods, her perspective displays a shift within the Hermès shopper, who’s more and more worldwide and, like Vanhée, shifts between international locations and cultures of their life and work. It has helped the corporate garner spectacular gross sales lately, whilst the posh market slows, which Dumas just lately credited to the ‘loyalty of our shoppers worldwide’ (for the primary quarter of 2024, income have been €3.8m, up 13 per cent). Hermès is not the reserve of a closed circle of rich Parisian bourgeoisie.
In Vanhée’s collections, contrasts abound: sensuality and toughness, masculinity and femininity, the quotidian with intricate flights of craft. She is usually deemed ‘enigmatic’, largely eschewing the highlight, and absent from social media. The place you anticipate her to go in a single path, she diverts – if subtly – to a different. A latest assortment noticed her use the craftspeople who often make the outré feathered outfits for the Moulin Rouge dancers to create a sequence of items that appeared like horsehair. ‘They’ve the aesthetic of being feathers, however in addition they seem like horsehair and are tremendous mild,’ she says. ‘I just like the shock factor of Hermès.’
Prime, £1,540; trousers, £7,170, all by Hermès (enquire at hermes.com)
(Picture credit score: Images by Lucrezia Ganazzoli, style by Jason Hughes)
As we speak, Vanhée is placing the ending touches to a particular New York present, assembly music producer Frédéric Sanchez that afternoon to finalise the soundtrack (the present later happened in June at Pier 36). It marked a possibility for the designer to attach with the rising American market with each the present and a sequence of activations and occasions throughout the week. ‘New York is a spot of resilience,’ says Vanhée, who notes town retains a private significance. ‘It gave me the possibility to be who I’m – with out my time in Manhattan, I don’t assume I might have had an opportunity to work with Hermès.’
The present was the second instalment (titled ‘The Second Chapter’) of the designer’s A/W24 assortment, which was offered earlier this 12 months on a moist afternoon at Paris’ Republican Guard through the metropolis’s style week. Inside, the heavens had opened, too: within the darkened present area, a theatrical trick noticed water pour from the ceiling and on to the runway. It marked a shift from the season prior, whereby the identical area had been reworked right into a brightly lit Edenic meadow, full with undulating mounds of wildflowers and lengthy grasses via which fashions wove. ‘[This time] I used to be actually impressed by central London, like Soho. It’s very darkish, [there’s] all of this black paint. And the rain,’ she smiles. ‘However I discover the rain very lovely.’
The gathering itself was titled ‘The Rider’, straddling inspirations from each equestrian-wear (Hermès started life as a harness maker in 1837) and bike riders (‘astride a horse or a motorbike… boldly she rides on,’ stated the gathering notes). ‘It was this sense of how do you place extra pepper within the Hermès girl than there already is?’ says Vanhée, who likened this season to ‘a self-portrait in a mirror’. Although, as she asserts, not of herself. ‘It’s extra a couple of contemplation inside your self, about discovering the energy inside.’
Jacket, £6,660; leggings, £8,500, all by Hermès (enquire at hermes.com)
(Picture credit score: Images by Lucrezia Ganazzoli, style by Jason Hughes)
‘I began by portraits that had struck me, like these by Lucian Freud,’ she says of the gathering’s nexus, noting a selected curiosity in ‘the completely different pores and skin tones he was creating in his work’. ‘There’s one thing concerning the gesture of the stroke,’ she feedback. ‘I used to be considering: what’s a portrait of a girl? Not in an instructional means, however one thing extra sensual.’ As is conventional for a Hermès assortment, it began with color (color playing cards are used throughout the completely different Hermès métiers, and infrequently start the method of creation). For A/W24, she stated her selections seemed again to the ‘roots of Hermès’: étoupe greys, earthy browns and deep reds, alongside tones she had found in Freud’s work. ‘It’s actually about intuition,’ she says of how she chooses the palette every season.
‘You’re actually connecting with the vulnerability of the particular person… there’s a direct contact to your pores and skin’
Nadège Vanhée
Subsequent comes the gathering’s textures, which this season largely comprised what Vanhée describes as ‘heritage materials’, amongst them aged calfskin, corduroy and moleskin. ‘Hermès is about this notion of contact so, as a technician, you’ll at all times qualify a material materials by its contact within the hand – we name it ‘le important’.’ Certainly, Vanhée talks a couple of new urgency to have fun tactility after Covid lockdowns. ‘We weren’t even in a position to sit down and speak. So once we got here out of that, I actually wished to push the sensuality. It’s this concept of redefining what’s sensual or horny via the instinct of a girl.’
And although Vanhée claims to not design clothes for herself, she admits that there’s ‘somewhat of me’ in every assortment, but in addition these round her (she says, gesturing on the Hermès staff who be part of us within the showroom). ‘It’s an ideal steadiness between what I like and what I wish to discover – my obsessions, my emotions. What I wish to put on, sure, but in addition items that exit of my consolation zone.’ Nevertheless, she admits, ‘with ‘The Rider’, I might put on every bit’. The title of the gathering got here from fascinated about the ‘hyperlink between a person human with a machine or an animal… the spirit of the open street’. For Vanhée, the bike – or certainly, the horse – is a ‘phenomenon of freedom’. At Maison Martin Margiela, she remembered establishing trousers from the saddles of motorbikes; right here, the ‘imprint’ of an equestrian saddle appeared within the development of the again of a leather-based jacket.
Prime, £6,350; trousers, £7,170; boots, £1,530, all by Hermès (enquire at hermes.com)
(Picture credit score: Images by Lucrezia Ganazzoli, style by Jason Hughes)
The thought of telling tales, says Vanhée, is on the coronary heart of Hermès. Tales of the home’s historical past will usually be overheard in corridors, or handed on by the artisans who work throughout the home’s métiers (a few of who rely their time on the home in many years, not years), whereas annually, artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas (the great-great-great grandson of Hermès founder Thierry Hermès) chooses a yearly theme that unites the métiers. For 2024, it’s ‘The Spirit of the Faubourg’, referring to the primary Hermès retailer at 24 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, which he calls ‘the beating coronary heart of the home’. Earlier years have been ‘Astonishing Hermès’, ‘An Odyssey’ and ‘Within the Pursuit of Goals’. ‘Hermès is a home of intelligence,’ says Vanhée. ‘It’s so based mostly on the thought of that means. There may be additionally this bridge between modernity and custom. Hermès has a capability for assimilation; it actually absorbs the adjustments in our existence.’
The time period ‘luxurious’ doesn’t resonate with Vanhée. As a substitute, she sees what Hermès does as ‘a preservation of high quality’. She desires to create a uniform to ‘shield towards the erosion of life’. Garments, for her, are ‘a portal to create an identification’, a instrument of self-definition that has adopted her from her teenage years when she would gown up in her mom’s outdated clothes and items that she present in secondhand shops. ‘Within the Nineties, there was this whole emancipation from the query: is it lovely, is it not lovely? I used to be in the proper place on the proper time. I might open myself up.’
Jacket, £16,390; trousers, £1,440, all by Hermès (enquire at hermes.com)
(Picture credit score: Images by Lucrezia Ganazzoli, style by Jason Hughes)
Now, she hopes that her collections at Hermès can have a equally liberating impact on their wearer. ‘You’re actually connecting with the vulnerability of the particular person… there’s a direct contact to your pores and skin,’ says Vanhée. ‘The individuals who put on my collections have completely different psychologies, completely different personalities,’ she continues, noting that she would by no means dictate how an merchandise of clothes is worn. She likes to see girls smiling. ‘I don’t wish to sound naive, however I need them to be proud, emboldened, assured. I’m actually simply observing several types of girls and their wants. I wish to go exterior my consolation zone and ask: what’s the lifetime of a girl in Hong Kong? A girl in Sacramento? One benefit of our civilisation is that we’ve this super-globalisation: we will see, we will go, we will test. We’re not locked in our little ivory towers.’
Mannequin: Dalton Dubois at Milk Administration. Casting: Ikki Casting at WSM. Hair: Yumi Nakada-Dingle utilizing Bumble and Bumble. Make-Up: Faye Bluff at Of Substance Company utilizing Hermès Magnificence. Nails: Jessica Ciesco at Snow Creatives utilizing Hermès. Images assistant: Pietro Lazzaris. Vogue assistant: Lucy Proctor. Manufacturing assistant: Ady Huq. Retouch: Camillo Bernardi Studio.
This text seems within the September 2024 problem of Wallpaper*, obtainable in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple Information +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* at the moment
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