The quiet master of French menswear is a woman – Véronique Nichanian, the longest-serving artistic director of any fashion house, who heads the men’s universe at Hermès. Until today. After 37 years at Hermès, she’s bowing out – “I quit,” she said, backstage a few hours before her show on Saturday evening. Although j'ai quitté is far softer in French, simply translating as “I left”. She hasn’t even really left – “I didn’t quitté the house,” she maintains. She will be artistic director of men’s leathers and silks. “Axel and Pierre-Alexis want me to stay. They did not want me to stop,” she smiles. “But I said, I think it’s the right time. You know, when you feel it? I’m not sad, I’m happy.”
Nichanian has every reason to be happy. She’s set now, she says, to spend six months in Japan with her husband, to have time to herself. Meanwhile, her legacy is intact: across four decades, her clothes have established both a new standard and a new language for luxury within menswear. Even if she doesn’t much care for the word herself. “What luxury is? I cannot say,” she comments. She’s ensconced in a room in the Palais Brongniart, the city’s former stock exchange built under Napoleon. “Nice, non?” It was indeed – and it’s a fitting echo of the security of the always-in-demand Hermès. But Nichanian is still thinking about luxury – what it is, what it isn’t, what it really means. Which, perhaps, is nothing. “Everybody says they’re doing luxury,” she said. “For us at Hermès, we do things with attention, with our heart. With the hand of the artisan, it’s a craftsman but it’s done with so much attention. This word luxury does not define anything for me.”
By contrast, Nichanian’s clothes are working clothes – not in their form and shape, although often they do draw from the reality of pragmatic outerwear, twisted with luxurious (she calls them “selfish”) touches. But rather in that they are rigorously worked and reworked by her team, by Hermès craftspeople and by herself. “I am a very demanding person,” she allows. “I am crazy about fabric research, innovation, mixing very traditional fabrics with the new.” That’s something that has marked out her Hermès tenure – waterproofed silks, double-faced and reversible leathers, crocodile treated until it is as fluid and malleable as a woven textile. Nichanian did not calm her innovation for her final show: this time, there were checkered sweaters knitted from cashmere and thin strips of lambskin. “It looks like a normal sweater, but at the end, the material is so special,” said Nichanian.
Nichanian insisted there was nothing different about this Hermès collection to any of the 70-plus others she has staged across her career. Although, actually there was – the new was in the old, Nichanian interspersing at irregular intervals outfits drawn from her past Hermès collections. There was no real rhyme or reason to this – it wasn’t, she asserted, about greatest hits or bestsellers. “It’s a few things which are very important for me, for my work,” she said, and also ones that chimed with the moods and materials of this latest, last show. The earliest was from 1991 – a leather jumpsuit, as elegant and slightly eyebrow-raising here and now as it was back in the day. Others came from 2001, or 2004 – a suit in navy calfskin, topstitched to appear finely-pinstriped, originated for spring 2003. You genuinely couldn’t tell where the past ended and the new took off. Which was precisely the point. “I love that which is long-lasting,” she said. “All my clothes, there’s a different way to read them. It depends on what you’re searching for.”
On the marble former trading-floor of the Brongniart, Nichanian plied her trade for the final time. Her Hermès men have a slight air of supreme confidence, a deeply attractive arrogance as they swaggered through the space, masters of the men’s universe in supple tailoring, wool felt, cashmeres, lots of leather. Details from Hermès scarves like chains or swirling florals were woven into wools or knitted into sweaters. As with all of her work, they were quietly sensational, eminently real. “Sensuality” was her word for these clothes. “It’s a collection I’m proud of,” she said, shrugging. She should be.
