How Hermès Unharnessed Fashion

[ed. Air mess..]

The sound of drumbeats filled the pavilion. The first model emerged onto a sinuous runway in a nubuck coat paired with chiffon pants that fluttered in the breeze, revealing knee-high calfskin boots. The outfit matched the pale yellow of the venue but upheld the Hermès aesthetic of discreet, horsey timelessness. So when the next model came out, also wearing shades of margarine and lemon, it took a moment to register that her look—a skintight, bell-bottomed catsuit covered in blinking sequins—represented a deviation from, if not a challenge to, the Hermès ideal. Hermès does not employ celebrity ambassadors, as most other major luxury brands do, but, perhaps in a nod to the setting, the evening’s front row was a touch starrier than usual. Miley Cyrus, open-mouthed, nudged Kerry Washington as the woman in spangles swept by—this was red-carpet clothing, flashbulb clothing, clothing to be seen in once rather than excavated annually from a closet of perennials. Nadège Vanhée, the artistic director of Hermès women’s wear since 2014, described the event’s conceit to me as “How do I create a conversation between the mystique of a French fashion house talking about horse carriages and the spirit of Los Angeles, which is rewind, erase, restart?”

Thierry Hermès, an Alsatian-born harness-maker, founded Hermès in 1837. (Pronunciation hint: “air mess.”) Over nearly two centuries in trade, the company has dealt in germinal francs, Poincaré francs, de Gaulle francs, and euros, always remaining family-owned. The current C.E.O., Thierry’s great-great-great-grandson Axel Dumas, presides over an empire of sixteen métiers, as the divisions are known in the house lexicon, including everything from saddlery, gloves, and belts to timepieces and tableware. Many people know Hermès for its intricately printed silk scarves (Grace Kelly once used one as a sling) and for its savagely coveted Birkin bags (whose rate of appreciation is said to outperform the S. & P. 500). The latter have inspired so many knockoffs that Judge Judy once devoted an episode of her show to a Birkin-counterfeiting scam, marvelling, “Twenny-nine hundrud dollas for a pockabook!”

These days, that would be a bargain, as even the most modest models cost five times as much. Hermès is worth an estimated hundred and ninety billion dollars, making it the second most valuable luxury-goods firm in the world. Last year, it briefly overtook the front-runner, L.V.M.H.—the slick conglomerate behind the likes of Louis Vuitton and Dior—its eternal nemesis and spiritual foil. 

In the capricious luxury sector, Hermès has a reputation for steady thinking. Protestants in a traditionally Catholic country, the family—now a tripartite mishmash of Dumases, Guerrands, and Pueches, owing to a surfeit of daughters at the end of the nineteenth century—is known for avoiding debt and investing for the long term. Its bags inspire a fevered economy of influencers, resalers, and aspiring buyers, thanks, in large part, to the company’s choice to keep supply diabolically low. Hermès positions itself above the melee, as a guardian of tasteful continuity. According to one former executive, the family sees money “merely as a means, especially for buying time,” and, according to one relative, “moral elegance” is considered a job requirement at Hermès. In 2016, at a benefit auction, Jeffrey Epstein placed the winning bid on an internship at Hermès; the company withdrew the lot and reimbursed the charity. Dumas later explained that the last thing Hermès needed was to get involved with a “louche financier.”

Hermès is a sporty house, but it is also the wonkiest house. The company employs a paleographer, for deciphering handwriting in old company correspondence, and maintains a collection of leather-bound ledgers containing the specs of every saddle made from 1900 to today. The first sixteen pages of last year’s annual report consisted of a cartoon about a globe-trotting Pegasus. It would be difficult to find another luxury brand that promoted an employee from sewing bags to designing them after he submitted a plea written entirely in Alexandrines. But Hermès did, and it is still producing that designer’s first creation, from 2002: the Picotin, inspired by feedbags. Suckers for a touch of whimsy, the company’s window dressers once garnished a display inspired by the Garde Républicaine, a famous French cavalry division, with a pile of horse manure. Such is the Hermès commitment to authenticity that the poop was sourced directly from the unit. [...]

The company’s twin values of work and quirk can sit uneasily in the distractible, self-serious fashion world, to the point that fashion at Hermès has historically been regarded as something of an oxymoron. Unlike its competitors, Hermès is a pre-haute-couture enterprise, founded before the rigid bureaucracy of French fashion was put into place, in the eighteen-sixties, with the establishment of a governing syndicate. Emilie Hammen, the director of the Palais Galliera fashion museum, explained that, as a result, the company “has never felt a need to prove itself within this framework.” Hermès tends to express itself through craft rather than through novelty. “I’m not doing fashion,” Véronique Nichanian, who designed menswear at Hermès for more than three decades, told GQ, in 2021, preferring to call her creations “clothes-objects.” The house is, in many respects, the antithesis of the kind of fashion described in Miranda Priestly’s famous cerulean speech, from “The Devil Wears Prada”: unlike its bags, whose imitators include Walmart’s seventy-eight-dollar Wirkin, Hermès’s clothes have traditionally trickled down nowhere, influencing no one. You will certainly not find an “equestrian gilet dress in satin-gray plongé ostrich” hanging on the racks at Target next year just because Hermès sent one down the runway.

Yet, under the stewardship of Vanhée, fashion is an increasingly important venture for Hermès. Internally, the division has grown by forty-four per cent since 2022, accounting for more than a quarter of the sixteen billion dollars in revenue that the company reported last year, and Hermès’s cultural influence is likewise on the rise. Lauren Sherman, the fashion reporter for Puck, wrote admiringly of the L.A. show, “This was the most Vanhée has ever inserted herself into the broader fashion conversation, which you don’t really have to do at Hermès.” A friend of mine who works in the industry was recently raving about a pair of stretchy, high-waisted black pants designed by Vanhée that she said insouciantly bundled together several desirable codes: equestrian, prep, surf, S & M. She continued, “You can wear them with literally anything and look like a sexy luxury bitch.” The writer and filmmaker Miranda July, who attended the show in L.A. wearing a blue turtleneck under a black leather Hermès overalls minidress, told me, “It’s kind of crazy that she’s making clothes for such wealthy people that are so sensuous and kinky. It’s for flesh—for beating skin with blood under it.”

The “Hermès game,” as it’s known, has spawned an entire repellent vocabulary. The ancillary purchases, for example, are euphemized among shoppers as “pre-spend” or “Birkin bait,” and tales circulate of aspirants attempting to curry favor with sales associates, or “S.A.s,” by offering cash and trips on private jets. In order to justify the expenditure, or perhaps the humiliation of having to beg for the privilege of parting with their money in a public store, some participants tend to treat what is realistically a one-way capitalistic transaction as some sort of bilateral spiritual quest. Reddit abounds with threads such as “What was your journey to a Special Order?”(A “special order” allows a client to customize her bag.) One lucky buyer replied, “In my case, I think my SA felt that I had enough neutral bags (two Birkins, an Evelyne, a KTG) that it was time for me to go through a special order to get a bag unique enough for me.” Drafting on Hermès’s cachet, a New York City plastic surgeon recently began providing a package of procedures for new moms known as the Birkin Body—lipo, a tummy tuck, breast surgery, and a butt lift.

by Lauren Collins, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Jet Swan