Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski is a hugger. While she took the confinement period in stride—revisiting her old sketchbooks and notes-to-self from her time at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp—the Hermès designer missed the human touch. “Well, look at us. Tactility has been taken away from us,” she pointed out during a socially distanced backstage session before her show. “I wanted the fantasy of touching. I think it’s important to keep that somehow.” Vanhee-Cybulski expressed her “skin hunger”—as the media has so seedily dubbed the lockdown phenomenon—in a collection that played with the naked and the seductive from different angles—from the sensual to the strict.
The rigid lines of aprons had the faintest air of fetish, backed up more insistently by fishnet dresses chain-mailed from bricks of horn. (“Horn-y,” quipped a fellow critic in a text postshow.) Coats had built-in scarves that could be rolled up at the front or wrapped tactilely around the neck. Knitted bodies with swimwear-like open backs were informed by the female curves of Hellenic ceramics, a theme echoed in a show constructed like an abstract take on ancient Greek ruins. On each of the digitalized columns, the work of different artists commissioned by Vanhee-Cybulski interpreted her collection in various art forms, which was also compiled in a “scrapbook” sent to editors around the world who couldn’t travel for the show.
“It was important to find a new way to communicate a collection. Because no one was able to travel, I just sent the clothes to the artists and they [worked with them] themselves,” she explained. After the pandemic forced her to cancel the London resort show she had planned in April, Vanhee-Cybulski decided to save the collection. “I said, we’re going to freeze what we have and settle a little bit. When we come back, we will assess it.” Current affairs considered, it was the right thing to do. Fifty percent of the garments she showed today were part of that original collection, now unified in one strong message with the new pieces she created during and after lockdown. “The pandemic has reinforced our values about a responsible approach and a perennial style,” the designer said. “But of course I still want to give fashion to the Hermès woman.”
If that was the brief she gave herself, Vanhee-Cybulski nailed it. These were enduringly seductive and viable clothes beyond the level of timelessness that comes with the Hermès territory, and with enough design value and cleverness to entice you runway-side. Sometimes her styling gestures gave you flashes of the collections she created with Martin Margiela at the house in the late 1990s; a legacy you sometimes felt evoked in Phoebe Philo’s work for Céline too. There is still a demand from so many women for the intelligently seductive, chic, purposeful fashion Philo mastered there. Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that Vanhee-Cybulski’s show took place at the Tennis Club de Paris, where the former Céline designer historically presented her collections.
