“America has the Wild West; France has the wild south.” Hermès’s Nadège Vanhée took inspiration this season from France’s Camargue. A river delta bordered by the Mediterranean Sea and two arms of the Rhône, the Camargue is wilder than its neighbors, home to white horses that the region’s cowboys, or manadiers, use to herd bulls. “I wanted to give a spirit of freedom, of letting go, of bohemianism, and translate the equestrian look for the city,” she said.
It started with a saddle from the Camargue in Hermès’s conservatoire. Making a study of it, Vanhée landed on corsets—not the lace-up-the-back satin corsets of 19th-century saloon keepers and West Village girlies out for a night of bar-hopping, bien sûr, but leather harnesses that she styled over bandeaus, button-downs, and quilted silk-twill riding jackets, all in an earthy palette of brown, olive, sand, red, and black. On another look, the harness held two ends of a printed scarf in place over the breasts.
A sexual undercurrent has run through Vanhée’s last several Hermès outings; here it was more explicit. “I wanted to have the language of the skin in the collection,” she said. In that regard, a more expansive view on body types would have been welcome.
The scarf print, reinterpreted from a scarf dating from the ’80s and printed on piqué, appeared in different guises: as a button-front shirt and as a quilted bra top and matching pencil skirt. Quilting, which Vanhée linked to the Camargue saddle, was one of the collection’s recurring motifs, on materials ranging from silk twill to an exceptional leather.
Before the show, a pair of sisters clad head to toe in matching Hermès—quilted bombers, minis, crocodile riding boots, crocodile Birkins, etc.—were posing for pictures and explaining the label’s appeal to an onlooker: “Security; you can build a wardrobe without the pieces going out of style or losing their credibility.” If those harness bras are a bit of indulgent fun, this season’s wardrobe-building addition is a practical new saddlebag in the collection’s warm, toasty colors.
