Hermès is a totem for designers in Paris. Any way you want to cut it, this French institution, with its horsey-bourgeoisie heritage, is a lodestar; an inspiration and reference point for designers as disparate—and as influential—as Phoebe Philo and Demna Gvasalia. The collections Martin Margiela designed for Hermès in the ’90s are reverberating through shows today. But Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski, the designer in charge at Hermès, does not play to that audience opportunity.
For the Hermès Spring collection, she insisted on her own esoteric ideas about patterns, colors, and silhouettes. Checks were a theme. The audience was funneled through a corridor lined with graph paper, and when they arrived at their seats they found a pamphlet titled “Hèrmes Colors” containing a texte de Jarvis Cocker; these were the lyrics of the specially commissioned music.
The first look was a green tartan horse-blanket cape over a dark green poplin shirt and high-waisted nubuck calfskin shorts. There followed a 50-outfit-long sequence of mostly slim, narrow compositions of pantsuits, coats, and tight midi-length dresses. The checks recurred in various iterations from picnic-blanket size (on a blue pantsuit) to silk voile madras-style squares on such items as a black-and-white smocked T-shirt. Looks 40 through 46 displayed an Hermès Grand Manège scarf print.
To keep up with the point of these clothes, one needed to refer to the descriptions in a booklet, some of which ran to eight lines long in the English translation. Of course, it is vital to appreciate what sets Hermès apart from others—the craftsmanship, which is a matter of almost fetishistic importance on a French cultural level. Should a woman of means bump into these clothes on a rack in a store, she would doubtless be impressed.
The virtues of Vanhee-Cybulski’s tenure here were all in the textures and the texts. She doesn’t deal in irony and subtext or indulge in playing around with the signs and symbols of a bourgeois heritage, which is the creative fodder of so many designers of her generation. The nearest she got to walking in step with other brands was when she forgot the perpendicular confines of her collection and showed a stunning voluminous cream leather poncho inspired by a horse blanket. Other than that, this collection studiedly kept to itself.
