Nadège Vanhée on her first 10 years at Hermès: “I never look back”

Nadège Vanhée left New York for Paris 10 years ago. She was a design director at The Row when Hermès called with the kind of offer you don’t say no to: the artistic director of women’s ready-to-wear. A decade later, though, the city still has its hooks in the French designer – once a New Yorker, always a New Yorker, as they say.

This week Vanhée is back in town to present a new collection – not Resort, to be clear, but a sort of part-two of the fall collection she showed in February. “I have a special connection with New York,” Vanhée said at a makeshift studio on the west side, and “when I did this second chapter I felt it was relevant to show it here because it’s the perfect blend between a French and an American girl.”

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The fall show – part one – was dedicated to horses and motorbikes, and it was the sexiest show of her Hermès tenure: lots of fitted leather and flashes of race car red. Tonight’s show isn’t an anniversary collection; still, her New York visit was cause for reflection. “I remember when I met Axel [Dumas, the executive chairman of Hermès], I said I really want to make the coat as relevant as the Birkin bag, and I think today we have customers who really discover the brand through the ready-to-wear, and that’s something which is quite exciting.” She took a break from fitting that ready-to-wear to talk mentors, the women role models who’ve led Hermès in the past, and how she maintains the house’s “attractive aura.”

On the allure of the Hermès creative director role:

I wanted to go to a house with really strong roots, which had strong stability. It was important for me; working for The Row, working for Celine, we were really at the beginning of something. I had to give a lot, because they were really starting their DNA. There was a strange feeling of going back to something familiar but at the same time super distant to me, because I hadn’t been there in years.

On what she learned at her jobs pre-Hermès:

Mary-Kate and Ashley? The sky’s the limit, the studio was very young and they showed me that if you want to do it, you do it. Especially coming from France where everything is ‘not possible’, it was nice to have the freedom of trying. Celine: the quest of working on a very strong assertive woman. I think what I learned from Martin, I remember one of our first meetings and he was like, [scoffs], ‘those archives.’ And I was like, ‘come on, Martin…’ and he said: ‘I don’t want to see anything from previous collections.’ And I think this has been imprinted on me: you look ahead, but you don’t ignore what you did and you also don’t give up your ideas.

On the designers who preceded her at Hermès:

Jean Paul Gaultier had a lot of freedom at the house. He was really experimental, he tried to expand the scope of the silhouette while still playing with ideas like fetishism. Martin Margiela before Gaultier was a sort of chiropractor or osteopath. The house had gone in every direction and he really helped to consolidate the fundamentals. And with Christophe Lemaire [her immediate predecessor], I didn’t want to look too much. Lemaire, Gaultier, and Margiela—they really brought their brand to the house and I really wanted to be more like a searcher. For me it was easier to go back to the first silhouettes that were designed in the ’20s and ’30s, and the work of Lola Prusac and Catherine de Karolyi. I naturally looked more toward the women who designed for Hermès. When you flick through the archives, lots of women have given a strong imprint to the house, even though the first clothes designed for women were men’s adaptations.

On being a woman designer:

Gender is tricky. When you’re a writer, you can write a female character if you’re male. I always get annoyed when we have to justify. It was Rebecca Solnit [the author of Men Explain Things to Me] who said that too: why do we have to justify anything? Yes, equality is great, but it doesn’t make me a better designer because I’m female. I do see this conversation about women designers happening. But women voting was like what 80 years ago [in France]. I mean, women having bank accounts in France only happened in the ’70s. What I see in fashion is just a reflection of that. There is a lot more to do.

On function over form:

The house is really about transmission. You acquire something and know you’re going to wear it and know you’re going to transmit to your children. There’s also this idea of anchor. People feel this is a stable object. I see lots of models, and they walk in with a vintage shirt from Hermès, and they say, ‘oh, I bought it in a vintage store,’ or ‘I got that scarf from my mom’ and they recontextualize it. There’s this Hermès motto: designing objects that really help the user everyday, this concept of being functional. And I think when you think about functionality, you’re always relevant.

On never looking back:

I don’t look back. I like to look ahead. There’s always things that we haven’t resolved and you push them further. Over these 10 years, you can definitely see an evolution in the silhouette. It has sharpened, but it’s playful and quite empathic. There’s a lot of different women who are quite fond of the collection and you put them in a room and they don’t look alike.

On what today’s show resolves:

It’s really the styling, the connection with the different metiers of the house: the jewelers, the accessoires, the hat, the scarf. We have different creative directors: Clémande [Burgevin Blachma, Fashion Accessories], and of course Pierre Hardy [Artistic Director of the shoe and jewelry collections]. There’s this great synergy. It’s not just the ready-to-wear. It’s a very interesting moment for Hermès, I think we have the right people at the right place.