After a Fall collection that spectacularly starred a Frenchwoman on a rendezvous with romance, Christophe Lemaire took Hermès into the jungle for Spring. He s not the first designer to inject steam heat into his show this week, but given last season s scenario, it was hard to resist the notion that Lemaire s woman was on the run now, hiding in Brazil or Vietnam from her love gone wrong.
Lemaire s big influence was Henri Rousseau, the Frenchman who painted jungles without ever having seen them. The pendulous flora of Rousseau s work were duplicated in the print that opened the show, with boots to match. The artist s dark jungle green colored tops, shifts, crocodile culottes, and a wrapped leather coat. It was, in fact, color that marched this collection on: mulberry, teal, sky blue, sunset orange—intense shades that were new to Lemaire s formerly neutral world. He applied them to long fluid shapes, ideal for a woman who values anonymity above all else. The mulberry jumpsuit paired with flip-flops? No chance anyone on the run will attract attention in that.
Still, as Lemaire pointed out, the Hermès woman is a traveler, an adventuress. In that spirit, the easiness of this collection made sense. Nothing more complicated than a voluminous shirt over a suede skirt, a generously cut linen suit, a blanket-weave wrap skirt. But this is, after all, Hermès, so there was also a pencil skirt in mustard croc, as casually tied as if someone had whipped a man s tie around its waist, or a petrol blue leather blazer draped over a teal blouse and a purple skirt in a symphony of Ackermann-like color. They seemed like the very essence of hiding in plain sight, like Malgosia Bela s appearance at the end of the show—white shirt, high-waisted pleated white pants, and a sense of chic malevolence. Lemaire can sure spin a story.
