Hermès womenswear artistic director Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski designs with total clarity. When you look at her clothes, like the divine Fall 2023 collection shown this past weekend in Paris, you don’t see references to other designers or some sort of belabored commentary about the world today. (Booooring!) Instead, there is purity of design and total purpose. The source of her clothing’s relevance is rooted completely in expressing its own system of beauty. How many other fashion houses can make that claim?
Fall 2023 began, she said backstage, with the idea of hair. It’s a brilliant subject for a fashion collection (in fact, it’s the subject of an upcoming exhibition at Musée des Arts Décoratifs). It looms large in mythology, from Gilgamesh to Rapunzel; it’s romantic, it’s political, it’s religious. And it’s intensely personal: who hasn’t cried after a bad haircut, or burned with self-consciousness during a bad hair day, or felt amazing for days after a restorative few hours at the salon? Vanhee-Cybulski was thinking in particular of the way a woman might absentmindedly play with her hair, twirling it around her finger or braiding it while she’s focusing on some other task. Or tossing it up. Hair tangles and weaves; it’s dead but makes a gal feel so alive!
The colors and textures of the clothes seemed to glow like hair glossed with ancient oils.
The colors and textures of the clothes seemed to glow like hair glossed with ancient oils. Her opening section was a series of monochrome layers of knits, wools, and moments of lurex, all in fabulous fiery red, chocolate, chestnut, radiant acorn, and supple black. The tones gleamed autumn leaves at their peak.
Most remarkably, everything looked light. The cashmeres looked fresh and airy; even the leathers, shearlings, and furs seemed to bob along with the freedom of a freshly done ’do. The jackets and many of the knits had ties or longish pieces of fabric, rather than buttons, to allow the wearer to tuck and tighten and secure the pieces more tightly at their own discretion (like braids!). Several of the looks were styled with little silk riding caps, which are destined to be a cult fall hit along the lines of the supple little clogs the designer showed in her Spring 2021 collection.
Those layered looks would have been rich enough for any other designer, but Vanhee-Cybulski had another intertwined story of plisse pieces, many with shoulder yokes covered in glossy beads. I don’t even think I have the writing skills to explain how beautiful these dresses, skirts, and tops were, glistening through the warm orange room like…what? A snake covered in morning dew? A fresh orchid? Dragonfly wings? Yes, I thought of Fortuny, the Spanish couturier whose pleated Delphos dresses were prized by eccentric socialites during the 1920s and ’30s. But the pieces were so sly and quiet that this felt less like a mere reference, and more like a communion with Fortuny’s enigmatic way of working—developing some secret way to conjure the beauty of the ancients. (I would also imagine these dresses will make Hermès a popular red carpet brand next year, or even this coming Oscars weekend.)
Two qualities made this collection a stand-out; I would even say it was one of Vanhee-Cybulski’s best in her tenure at Hermès. First, it was incredibly luxurious. I don’t mean in a slick, fresh-from-the-package kind of way. That kind of layering of beautiful fabrics in wowee colors always looks sublime, whether it’s in fashion (the designer Zoran and Bonnie Cashin, who once designed for Hermès, also knew how to do this well) or in art, as in the meticulous color field paintings of Barnett Newman or Mark Rothko.
There is something really human about Vanhee-Cybulski’s clothes.
But there is also something really human about Vanhee-Cybulski’s clothes, and this is the second quality. So much luxury today is defined as such because it appears to be the product of some mechanized and perfected process, something machine-like. As skeptical as we are of technology, it somehow remains our deity. But these clothes looked resolutely human.
I don’t mean that they look handmade, though the plisse dresses certainly looked to me at the level of couture. Rather, you can see the ideas forming and shifting in Vanhee-Cybulski’s brain as the looks ebb and flow down the runway before you. There is the acceptance of naturalism and even imperfection, and a joyful yielding to nature itself when the human plan comes up short.
If many luxury goods are designed to protect the wearer from the scrapes of life, Vanhee-Cybulski’s clothes allow for the strangeness of existence and its unexpectedness, and even welcome it with a sideways laugh. (Put on your satin helmet and face the music!) The pieces will never speak louder than the woman wearing them, but they also have quite a bit to say: they are intelligent, even boisterous at times. This collection was an instant classic, but there was nothing expected or bourgeois about it. It was totally Hairmès.
Hermes Fall 2023 RTW
