Backstage before her latest Hermès show, Nadège Vanhée was standing in front of a board of photographs of scruffy, sliced-apart satin ballet slippers. That felt out of the box, for Hermès, which was fitting for an out-of-season, out-of-comfort-zone spectacular staged in the foothills of California’s Santa Monica Mountains. It was also held outside, to continue the theme. Hermès calls these annual shows “Act II”, staged in the summertime as a second chapter of their Autumn/Winter show. In the past, Vanhée has called them ‘cousins’ to ally them, albeit not too closely, to their predecessors. This time, however, the show danced solo.
“Craftsmanship, expertise, rigour” was how Vanhée connected dance with fashion – at least, with her fashion, and Hermès’ tradition too. The pointe ballet shoe was, for her, “a symbol of the hard work and discipline behind this lightness” – which again strikes a chord. It wasn’t just an empty metaphor: it surrendered strapping, wrapping and top-stitching that replicated both the shoe and its tight-wound ankle ribbons (delicate in appearance, but actually anchoring the whole thing to your feet). There was also a slick wool-silk satin duchesse, so glossy it almost resembled leather, in Technicolor shades of panstick beige, lipstick red and an electric blue like Liz Taylor’s eyeshadow. Vanhée was wearing tailored trousers in the former, which she was about to show bottoming out tailored suits, alongside narrow peplum jackets and gently puckered pencil skirts and bombshell cocktail dresses that each had a Marilyn Monroe wiggle. She was perhaps an unavoidable allusion in the week of her centenary, and also for a show in Los Angeles, an unexpected locale for Hermès. At least, you’d think – but, following a short-lived 1930 opening in New York at the height of what would become the Great Depression (even Hermès make mistakes), it was where the house wound up opening its first US outpost in 1972.
Hermès, of course, has always been beloved by film stars, the best but by no means only example being Grace Kelly, who surrendered her name to one of its handbags, but this collection was no pas de deux between handbags and Hollywood. Alongside the pointe shoes, Vanhée pinned up a few of the house’s fluttering carré scarves, whose motion she transposed into dresses in fluid silk-velvet that seemed to plié around the body. Leather was, obviously, omnipresent, here worked into tooled leather jackets that recalled Nudie’s Rodeo tailoring – a direct nod to LA – but actually replicating patterns from those scarves in inlaid leathers. There was also a further dance between flou and tailleur, ballet as an excuse for an exploration of soft dressmaking, Vanhée said. Which generally meant a masterful softening-up of the toughness you always think of with Hermès’ leather-making focus.
“Dreams and reality” was another idea – those old studios were dream factories back in the golden age, and Hermès staged this show in an open-sided buttery yellow pavilion perched implausibly against verdant green hills, a reflection of the low clusters of major modernist architecture all around, very real homes to the very rich and famous. Well, Hermès is both of those things. Their home-away-from-home here simultaneously reminded me of the here-today, gone-tomorrow scenography of a Hollywood movie, and a lesser-known antecedent of ephemeral ballrooms, erected in the twilight of France’s Ancien Régime in the 18th century, as elaborately conceived and painstakingly constructed as any architectural marvel but present for just one night. Another dance, there, between old world and new. That idea was also present in some of the quietest looks in the collection, in asphalt black – elegant dresses pleated or smocked to cling to the body like dancers’ leotards, but punctuated with tiny beads or sequins. Vanhée wanted them to look like lights glistening in a nighttime sky. A short jacket scrolled with velvet, meanwhile, had been hand woven on centuries-old Venetian looms. Unique and quietly spectacular, they felt like compelling precursors, maybe, to Vanhée’s (and Hermès’) couture debut, unofficially slated for next year.
