PANTIN, France – As a baby, Nadège Vanhee was discouraged from sporting pink: It could match her hair, she was advised. However since her first assortment for Hermès in 2015, she has embraced the color, utilizing it like one other inky black. Sensuous and radical.
In 20 seasons, Vanhee has step by step reinvented Hermès’ ready-to-wear collections, working from the within out with out gimmicks or parody. There are not any movie star muses, quite, inspirations roam from city to nation landscapes, from horses to motorbikes. Earth tones, taupy greys and buttery beige develop into newly fascinating alongside her signature reds.
Building meets fluidity, beginning with a deep respect and understanding of fabric. Then comes the reduce, with volumes knowledgeable by gestures: “Zipping a collar, a skirt, buckling an overcoat, tightening the cords on a rain jacket,” Vanhee says. The motion comes earlier than the picture.
Born in 1978 in northern France, Vanhee made her debut at Martin Margiela, then at Celine underneath Phoebe Philo, earlier than becoming a member of The Row in New York. In 2014, she was named inventive director of Hermès girls’s ready-to-wear.
Vanhee’s collections are discreet however outstanding, anchored in a model historical past that she seeks neither to erase nor to scale back to mere signifiers. From silk twill to stirrup belts, every component of the Hermès DNA is current, however metamorphosed, as in her Autumn/Winter 2025 biker jacket whose stitching echoes the development of a saddle.
Vanhee met The Enterprise of Vogue in Hermès’ Pantin studio, the place colors and craftsmanship preserve a fusional relationship. Work on collections begins years upfront, as a part of a dialogue throughout Hermès sixteen métiers together with sneakers, baggage, silk and, since 2020, magnificence. To not point out the upstream work that goes into sustaining Hermès’ legendary requirements for product growth and high quality.
At Hermès, Vanhee returns a sure grandeur to French ready-to-wear. Her religion within the energy craftspeople, united by shared vocabulary and values, recollects a bygone period.
And but rigorous design and manufacturing are blended with a rebellious spirit, rejuvenating the notion of female magnificence with lighter, extra body-conscious silhouettes for a lady in movement.
In her Spring/Summer season 2025 assortment set to be proven throughout Paris Vogue Week on Saturday, colors impressed by the home’s iconic leathers are recast as paints in an artist’s palette. Pores and skin tones like ebony, chestnut, camel and gold are punctuated with vibrant hues like bougainvillaea pink.
The gathering, devoted to the artist’s studio as an area of creation, reinforces and helps an more and more singular perspective.
Laurence Benäim: A phrase to explain Hermès’ Spring/Summer season 2025 assortment? What was your place to begin?
Nadège Vanhee: Sensual. For me, sensuality means pores and skin, the dermis. The flesh tones within the assortment recall leather-based, evoking a way of contact. There’s a really carnal thought of summer season; the physique is revealed. There’s transparency and lightness, whereas fluid knits categorical a symbiosis with the physique.
I began with the artist’s studio as a spot to have fun creation. artists, notably girls. I thought of studio uniforms, and the way an apron tied across the hips means one thing totally different within the context of the atelier. An evocation of freedom, with pockets.
At Hermès, all the colors have one thing to do with the pores and skin. I didn’t need to stifle the gathering through the use of the colors of uniforms, however quite to uncover their sensual side.
You’ve been designing Hermès’ girls’s ready-to-wear collections for 10 years now. How have your collections modified?
I desire to talk of evolution quite than rupture. After I began out, I used to be aware of leather-based, however I had saved it at arm’s size. Right here, I found a vocabulary, a manner of working with this residing, singular materials. A strategy mixed with a way of respect.
It took time to construct the group. At present there are 17 of us within the ready-to-wear studio, and every assortment is created in synergy with the corporate’s different métiers, beginning with sneakers, as a result of a silhouette with out sneakers is unattainable. Then I work with the leather-based items and silk groups. It takes at the least two years of fine-tuning.
The well-known “temps Hermès…”
It’s the time it takes to mix experience in perform and aesthetics. It’s a rhythm that leads me to work additional upstream, with a way of teamwork pushed to the acute.
The denims on this assortment had been washed, softened, and woven in Japan over a yr in the past.
What drives you ahead in your work?
What I’m in search of is magnificence. It’s a quest. An aesthetic emotion that touches on sensuality — that’s what retains me going.
I really like exploring the colors of leather-based related to the earth, with nature. The older I get, the extra I realise that I used to be influenced by childhood visits to Algeria: Algiers, the Hoggar desert, the Aurès mountains.
Then there’s updating a residing heritage, making a lineage between the artwork of the tailor and the saddler. And all the time upsetting surprises, with extra transparency and lightness.
Hermès’ equestrian roots are all the time current. How do you go about incorporating the equestrian spirit?
Equestrian references are a place to begin, not a aim. It’s about discovering components within the archives that may be transposed analytically quite than actually.
Your obsession?
My mission, my imaginative and prescient is to disclose the assertiveness of the Hermès lady: the inventiveness, the creativity, this spirit of analysis, discovery, the magnetism of a presence. It’s these values, these property that seduce and attraction.
Each season we reshuffle the deck and provide you with new combos. The intention is to suggest a imaginative and prescient that doesn’t crush individuality and manages to transcend the clichés of androgyny. To take a traditional garment — a trench coat, a blouson — and make it fascinating immediately. To make a garment as stunning as a bag.
Celebrating an perspective, references to girls I’m drawn to love [photographer and actress] Alice Springs, and different inspiring pioneering figures.
Which bag, in case you had to decide on one?
That’s troublesome. I’d say the Plume, the Trim or the Kelly.
How do you reconcile the notion of style with the Hermès ethos of timeless fashion?
Type and style cross and uncross. The Hermès fashion is recognisable, and it feeds off style to satisfy new wants, new capabilities, new factors of view. Claude Brouet, Christophe Lemaire, Martin Margiela, Jean-Paul Gaultier: every introduced his personal id, whether or not in prints or shapes. However the firm is larger than style.
I’m very fortunate to work for a corporation whose heritage goes again six generations. It’s not cumbersome. It’s a narrative of reduce, perform, self-discipline, and seduction. It’s a particular relationship between the craftsman who assembles the garment, and the one that’s going to put on it, for all times. That’s the magic recipe.
What do you see because the model’s best strengths?
The power of this model lies in its deeply rooted values. It’s a self-discipline. We’re speaking about hyper-demanding high quality, transmission, and elegance. Then there’s audacity, a seek for playfulness and lightness. This firm is a beehive of concepts in perpetual proliferation.
In my collections, I dig deeper into this analysis, combining it with the beliefs of motion and sensuality.
In recent times, I feel extra than simply an evolution there’s been a clarification of what Hermès style is. It’s as if I had been an amplifier.
Any phrases of recommendation?
Free your self to say your self, depart house for instinct. I used to be 19 with a literary diploma, I made a decision to enter design. As a redhead, I used to be already used to getting some snide remarks, to being ostracised for being barely totally different. As a baby, I wasn’t allowed to put on pink; I used to be advised it didn’t go together with my hair. At present, I gather pink clothes. They’re like characters.
Editors’ Word: This dialog has been edited for concision and readability.
