How Hermès Unharnessed Fashion

In Los Angeles, the sexy luxury bitches continued down the runway. The most persuasive dialogue between French pedigree and Californian freedom came in the form of a pair of short jackets, one in calfskin and one in goatskin, featuring motifs, realized in complicated leather marquetry, that equally recalled the Longchamp racecourse and the Wild West. After a series of slouchy suits and bustier dresses in turquoise and scarlet silks, the show exploded to black, culminating in a series of bravado gowns. A two-piece set featured palazzo trousers trailing a nimbus of silk and a stomach-baring bandeau top cinched with a leather belt at the bust. Vanhée has said that she thinks of leather as the conscious and silk as the subconscious, the former structuring and the latter flowing—this look, then, was integration, fusing the banker’s accessory with the sexpot’s attitude.

Vanhée emerged from backstage at the end of the show in red trousers, a red top, a caramel-colored leather bomber, and a pair of yellow-and-black La Sportiva trail-running sneakers that she wears everywhere, maybe to offset all those hides and tulles. Because she is indifferent to self-mythologizing and thinks intently about what she says—and perhaps also because, physically, she corresponds to some people’s idea of a melancholic Pre-Raphaelite maiden—she has often been characterized as “an enigma” or “mysterious,” or even “cold-blooded.” The more straightforward reality is that she is someone with a healthy sense of priorities, who considers it more radical to act as a steward than to play the renegade, even if she prefers to do a little bit of both. “My work isn’t my personal diary,” she told me matter-of-factly. “As a creative, I want to give a certain orientation, but to work at Hermès is also to be of service.” She is, in other words, the anti-auteur—a mature, cerebral mortal to fashion’s babbling gods and kings. Free of undue pressure from her bosses or the public, from above or from below, she may be the last fashion designer unbeholden to the comments section.

The company’s historic seat in Paris’s Eighth Arrondissement, 24 Rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré, is central to the mythology of Hermès. In 2src19, the company released the first versions of a bag it calls the Faubourg Birkin, which depicts the building’s arch-windowed façade in different conditions—day, night, rain, midnight. (A rare snow edition, made of alligator skin, recently sold for some four hundred thousand dollars at a private sale.) A few years later, Hermès commissioned the journalist and filmmaker Frédéric Laffont to write a book about the headquarters. After months of hanging around the labyrinthine premises—going up and down “the red staircase,” which is red, and “the green staircase,” which is also red—Laffont came away thinking that Hermès resembled a cult, or a tribe, with its own grammar, rites, and totems. Pascale Mussard, a sixth-generation family member, recalling the all-night Christmas celebrations she attended at the headquarters as a girl, during which each worker’s child would receive gingerbread and an orange, reached for another metaphor: “It was like the village of the Smurfs.”

Charles-Émile Hermès, the founder’s son, moved the company to 24 Faubourg in 188src. Baron Haussmann, making way for the boulevards, had demolished the original headquarters, near La Madeleine, and Charles-Émile wanted the company, which specialized in saddlery at the time, to be closer to the Élysée Palace, with its great stables and tony crowd. By the turn of the twentieth century, the area counted some forty maisons du cheval, including riding schools and makers of saddles, harnesses, and carriages. With Charles-Émile’s sons, Émile and Adolphe, at the helm, the company became the area’s star tenant, furnishing saddles to a Continental élite, including Nicholas II, the Tsar of Russia. Émile’s leatherworkers often married Jeanne Lanvin’s seamstresses, who were confecting gowns for society women just across the way.

A photograph from the era shows Émile’s four daughters, in braided buns and white drop-waist dresses, posing with an iron rocking horse that still sits in his former office at 24 Faubourg. In July, Menehould de Bazelaire du Chatelle, who was Hermès’s artistic director of cultural patrimony until her recent retirement, welcomed me into Émile’s lair, which has been lovingly preserved as a private museum. The place teemed with treasure: a samurai’s coral-studded stirrup, a miniature game of dominoes that could be worn as a pendant, a cane whose head popped open to reveal a mustache brush and a pick for gathering wild mushrooms. Bits and bridles filled every corner, giving the place the feel of the world’s poshest Cracker Barrel. A shelf held dozens of obscure cookbooks, which Hermès scarf designers can consult for gastronomy-themed prints. There was a nineteenth-century praxinoscope that recalled the magic lantern from Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.”