A wardrobe for life: Hermès makes desire crystal clear
For Spring-Summer 2027, Nadège Vanhée distilled Hermès into a wardrobe of ease and instant covetability. Anders Christian Madsen reviews the show.
This season’s shows have seemed intent on making desire specific again. In a difficult market, clarity is becoming a commercial virtue. Houses are sharpening their codes, designers are defining their silhouettes, and runways are essentially answering the most elementary question in fashion: what do I actually want to buy? If a brand’s success is measured by a combination of desirability, growth, profitability and brand discipline, Hermès is leading the game. On its runway, it can afford to be abstract, experimental and unexpected. But in a shopping-driven season, that doesn’t mean it can’t quickly flex its muscle of instant covetability, too. You know… show ‘em how it’s done.
On Saturday afternoon in a bright, white box erected within the Garde Républicaine, that’s what Nadège Vanhée did. Going for pragmatism over experimentation, she casually showed a collection that read like a string of pearls of ultimate dream-wardrobe pieces: pristinely cut blousons in the purest leathers, piped car coats and Crombie coats with the perfect weight and wearability, architecturally enhancing shift dresses passed off with ease, lightweight skirt suits for the real world, and the kind of overcoats you’d consider a purchase for life. Backstage, Vanhée said she wanted to convey a sense of clarity. If she meant showing us the clothes we’ve always really wanted, the message came through crystal clear.
With various protests and parades making it impossible to get around Paris, the house had to wait for people to arrive as temperatures within the illuminated box steadily climbed to a clammy high. “It was really hot in this room, but it was about air! You got it, right?” Vanhée quipped post-show. She based her wardrobe of clarity on ideas of air: “The way the air transports and the way air drapes. It was this intersection of pragmatism – a summery wardrobe – mixed with this metaphor of freedom. We need to breathe, we need to expand. I mean, we’re living it,” she said, gesturing at the hot show space. “That’s the pragmatism.” This Hermès show was real in every way, and undoubtedly one of the best of Vanhée’s twelve-year career at the house.
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