Nadège Vanhée let her inner New Yorker out tonight. The Hermès artistic director was going on four years in the city when she was plucked from The Row’s design studio by Axel Dumas, Hermès’s executive chairman. Ten years later, a milestone not many designers manage to reach at heritage labels these days, she’s still going strong.
So strong, Hermès came to town to stage a sort of part deux of the fall collection she presented in Paris in March. The house has so far been a resort season holdout. In an interview earlier this week, Vanhée said this show was a one-off, not the beginning of a new destination show routine: “I have a special connection with New York. 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.”
For years, “French girl style” has been internet gold, and decades before that, the French were pop culture-famous for their way with silk scarves. In real life the similarities and differences between French and American women are equally elusive, but a few things seem to be mutually agreed upon. Like the necessity of smart, sexy leather pants (high-waisted, cropped above the ankle, and worn with exceedingly covetable glossy leather cowboy boots), the cool factor of a roomy jumpsuit in, say, horizontally oriented corduroy with leather sleeves (note the aforementioned scarves tucked into the collars), and the fun of wearing fistfuls of rings and bracelets.
With its roots in equestrianism, Hermès is an outdoorsy brand, but this collection, like the one in Paris in March, was urban and urbane, with Kelly bags strapped over shoulders or worn around the waist to keep hands free for the daily commute. Statement outerwear, another city-dweller essential, was also much in evidence, from a reversible cropped puffer, one side in electric blue shaved shearling and the other in a darker leather, to a taxi yellow trench with turned-up brown leather cuffs. That color was the biggest surprise, given the mutual French and American (or New Yorker at least) preference for black.
After Vanhée came out for a bow, curtains peeled back to reveal well-stocked bars and a stage lit up with a sign reading Hermès Manhattan Roquebar, roquebar being a French portmanteau for striped horse rug, the patterns of which were another collection leitmotif. Before long, Caroline Polachek came out in a traffic-stopping red leather vest and pants to perform her runaway hit “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings,” a very on-message sentiment.
