There’s been so much discussion of the meaning of the bourgeois this season, what with the likes of Celine and Burberry, respectively, reaching for the touchstones of French and British conservative fashion values. Hermès—the most haute of haute leather goods companies in the world—might be thought of as not just epitomizing but being somehow the mothership of all the codes. Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski, who designs womenswear for the house, politely shook her head at that notion in her backstage interviews. She prefers to define Hermès as “classicism as a modern way of seeing life”—a philosophy that lifts the label’s modus operandi well clear of whatever trend enthusiasm might be galloping through fashion at any given moment.
You need only spend a few seconds zooming in on her Fall show to perceive that Hermès exists both semantically and qualitatively above and to the side of fashion’s whims. Its extraordinarily made clothes and accessories are tooled to last for generations, not to be tossed aside in the never-ending cycle of consumption—old-fashioned behavior is literally the new “modern.” Nor would the house want to hitch itself to the bandwagon of sustainability, since nondisposability is just how it has always rolled: Vulgar wastefulness is the antithesis of posh.
Which is where this collection was quite personal for the designer. Three of the simplest looks—textured, knee-length leather pencil skirts and long-sleeved printed silk T-shirts embodied time-defying emotional continuity for her. The T-shirt print, she said, was the one “on the very first scarf I saw from Hermès, my mother’s.”
There were no identifying show notes to describe the techniques that produced the surface effects in this collection—one suspects they must be Hermès state secrets. “I want to turn leather into almost a textile,” said Vanhee-Cybulski. With Hermès craftspeople, she can. What is certain is that the finesse that went into the contoured seaming of a parchment-colored glossy calfskin shift dress is literally inimitable.
More practically, the makings of Hermès’s huge variety of outerwear is what haute couture is to ball gowns. Consider the textured camel-hair cocoon coat with its Hermès-orange double-face lining, pyramid-shaped leather buttons, and a single pocket with a leather flap fastened with a utility D-ring—or any of the leather-piped coats, come to that. There were iterations of the voluminous cold-weather utility coats that have been threaded through the season, “leather on the outside, goose feather on the inside,” the designer noted.
Vanhee-Cybulski knows how to tether branding to the attractions of the house, whether it’s simply a matter of triggering the use of Hermès orange or displaying the H logo in silver on bag hardware. Granted, there were empty, squashy oversize totes being clutched, but it was the glossy, structured, smaller-scale shoulder bags that landed nearest to being the most classic—and also the most ragingly fashionable item on that runway.
Forget the quirky distractions of the leather shorts and whatever. Post-decadence, after the dressing-up parties to forget the collective nervous breakdown the world is facing, what will endure as a reason to spend is the long-lasting, well-made classic product. Whatever trendy fashion has to say on that topic, it’s Hermès that has the real thing.
