CAMILLE VIVIER
When Nadège Vanhée-Cybulski, artistic director of Hermès’s womenswear, was 19—or maybe 21; those years, she says, are a bit blurry—she put together a look she was really proud of: “I wore huge, baggy, really oversize Levi’s with tiny, tiny, skinny black T-shirts,” she tells me. “I had really short, short hair, and I used to wear these white clogs.”
At the time, Vanhée-Cybulski was a student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Belgium, the Antwerp fashion school renowned for producing such talents as Martin Margiela, Ann Demeulemeester, and Dries Van Noten. She describes her collegiate aesthetic back then as “sort of techno, with mystique.” She was really into Britpop; as a teen in Lille in northern France, she and a friend wrote for a music zine as a way to get into shows for free. It’s hard to picture Vanhée-Cybulski, now 43, with “short, short” hair, so distinctive are her long auburn waves, porcelain complexion, and serene expression, which have on more than one occasion garnered comparisons to a Renaissance portrait. Her look when we meet—a tan cashmere coat with toggle clasps, a dark sweater, jeans, and a brown Kelly 32—is also a far cry from anything that could be characterized as “techno, with mystique.” Instead, she projects a precise and restrained cool, a quality she brings to the runway.
Vanhée-Cybulski got the top job at Hermès in 2014, following the departure of her predecessor, Christophe Lemaire. Her appointment was then-new executive chairman Axel Dumas’s first major move at the luxury house, and it signaled a dedication to ready-to-wear as a growth category. Eight years on, Vanhée-Cybulski’s found her groove, marrying the refined quality of Hermès’s craft with understated, modern designs.
Going to work at a 185-year-old French house like Hermès, weighty with history and heritage, could feel overwhelming. But Vanhée-Cybulski simply breaks it down into pieces. “Regarding the DNA [of the brand] … I’m not a geneticist, but it’s Legos, right?” She remembers that when she got the job, she was “very, very, very enthusiastic to start at Hermès because there’s what you know about the house: the quiet style, the accurateness.” Then there is the aura that surrounds it. Stepping into the role, she says, felt like entering a hidden realm where she could finally “see how this magic works.” Each new collection, she explains, is a chance to design a new structure with the same building blocks. “You need to be the architect and construct with it so it’s not stagnant,” she says. “It’s quite dynamic.”
These skills come to bear in a comically real way as we settle in for a chat at the restaurant of the swanky Carlyle hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. (Vanhée-Cybulski is in New York for a dinner, which ultimately gets canceled as Omicron rages on.) It’s the third location we’ve attempted for our interview. Vanhée-Cybulski is inspired by fine art and photography (her husband, Peter, is a gallerist in Paris), so we meet first at the David Zwirner gallery to see the work of pioneering abstract artist Hilma af Klint. The show, though, turns out to be a few watercolors in a single room; we see it all in 10 minutes. We then move to the café down the block, but it is impossibly loud, so we walk eight blocks to the Carlyle. As we settle into the relative quiet in our velvet seats, Vanhée-Cybulski constructs a chic little stand for my phone to record our conversation, using salt and pepper shakers and a laminated QR code. Those clogs of Vanhée-Cybulski’s youth resurfaced more than 20 years later when she paired every single look from her Spring 2021 ready-to-wear collection for Hermès with a low-heeled version. And then a funny thing happened: A fervor for the shoes broke out among fashion’s most discerning. They seemed to be on every editor’s and stylist’s shopping list, as breathless posts gushed over the new “status clog.” Within weeks, they were sold out.
Hermès’s famed leather goods, notably its Birkin and Kelly bags, have always stirred up a frenzy; the wait lists to get certain styles are legendary. But for a clog? “It’s one of the most simple and unattractive things,” Vanhée-Cybulski says of the shoe. “I was surprised.”
What is telling about the success of the clog—and of Vanhée- Cybulski’s womenswear for Hermès in general (last year, third- quarter sales of ready-to-wear were up 43 percent compared with pre-pandemic 2019)—is how she approaches what might seem like a contradictory remit. She needs to create seasonal collections that must consider and respond to trends—which are, by their definition, fleeting—at a company renowned for its timelessness. In other words, the Birkin’s appeal endures because the way it is made—by hand, by artisans who have trained for years, using the finest materials—has remained largely unchanged for decades. What’s on the runway has to change every six months. Vanhée-Cybulski deadpans: “I’m always asking of myself, ‘What is this oxymoron? I’m doing fashion at Hermès.’ ” She appears unfazed by that challenge. Vanhée-Cybulski has proved to be remarkably adept at creating covetable designs that feel fresh while drawing on various elements of Hermès’s centuries-old tradition of quality and attention to detail to achieve them. In her Spring 2022 collection, she finished the hems, collars, and cuffs on roomy tunics, sleek overalls, and boxy day coats with leather trim dotted with studs, hardware typically used for leather goods. She also created cinched waists using drawstrings like those found on the dust bags used to protect precious leather accessories.
“I had been waiting for the ready-to-wear to connect to the leather goods. They are pieces you invest in; they become heirlooms,” says Robin Givhan, senior critic at large for The Washington Post, who has critiqued the Hermès runways since the days when Martin Margiela and Jean Paul Gaultier were designing for the house in the late 1990s and 2000s. “And I think that [Vanhée-Cybulski’s] clothing respects that.” Whereas, Givhan suggests, the Gaultier years leaned too far into “capital-F fashion,” she says Vanhée-Cybulski “is doing a better job of straddling the line between respecting this idea that these clothes have a long shelf life but also making sure that they still feel contemporary and easy, not stuffy.”
Vanhée-Cybulski is uncharacteristically accessible for someone in her position. Typically, an artistic director from a major luxury brand will be guarded by flanks of flacks like a celebrity. But on this chilly day in early December, it’s just the two of us schlepping from location to location until we find a suitable place to talk. It’s intentional, she says. “I said to [the team], I just want to have a one-to-one.”
She feels similarly about the brand; she wants people to be able to find a way in. I mention the broader cultural impact of some of Hermès’s most famous accessories—namely the Birkin, which shows up on everyone from well-heeled ladies in Paris’s 16th arrondissement to J.Lo as she’s exiting the gym and has been memorialized in countless rap songs. “It’s pop,” she says. “It’s strange to say that Hermès is ‘democratic,’ but I really believe it is.” Strange because, for most people, Hermès is prohibitively expensive; the cost of the ready-to-wear is typically in the thousands of dollars, while a Birkin or Kelly will run in the five figures. She clarifies: “Good taste is for everybody. You can say, ‘Okay, I’m buying this piece, and it’s a piece that is going to last.’ If you divide it by the years that it lasts, it’s actually a very good rate. But you also have things that are maybe more accessible: the bracelets, the makeup, the scarf.”
CAMILLE VIVIER
Before Vanhée-Cybulski’s arrival at Hermès, her profile was chicly inauspicious; unlike many of her peers, she had no public Instagram presence (and still doesn’t). But her résumé at labels known for their quiet luxury teed her up perfectly for the job.
After graduating from Antwerp’s Royal Academy, Vanhée- Cybulski did stints at a holy trinity of minimalist fashion: at Maison Martin Margiela in the mid aughts, at Céline under Phoebe Philo, and, most recently, in New York as design director for the Row. She is the first woman to serve as Hermès’s womenswear artistic director in decades. (Catherine Karolyi designed Hermès’s first women’s ready-to-wear collection in 1967, and Lola Prusac designed for the house in the 1920s and ’30s.) The role was held by Gaultier and Margiela before Lemaire. And unlike Lemaire, Gaultier, and Margiela, Vanhée-Cybulski is not also working on her own separate namesake collection. Vanhée-Cybulski continues to fly under the radar on social media (“It’s just too much performance”), but she has a private account where she follows people and entities she considers “genuine,” like East Village Shoe Repair (@eastvillageshoerepair_bk), which posts photos of its custom upcycled platform shoes, and the Zurich vintage shop the Pink Sheep. Her tastes and inspirations are specific. For the Fall 2022 collection, she says she referenced the work of Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri, known for his softly saturated colors, and created a story around loden, the moss-green wool.
Vanhée-Cybulski believes that her gender, or the fact that she is a newish mother, should have no bearing on her career. “I don’t know why we always have to justify how women are dealing with their private life and passion,” she says when I ask how motherhood during lockdown affected her work. (She does admit that “the motherhood was new, the lockdown was new, and so it was about trying to keep it together.”) Fair enough; our society rarely expects successful men to expound on how they “have it all”— mostly because they already do. She is, however, willing to concede that her designs are more personal and that her femininity is wrapped up in them. “I’m fed up with hearing that a woman should not wear this, or if they wear this they’ll get hit on,” she says. “It’s always this very moral gaze, which has been constructed mainly by men.”
Hermès’s consolidated revenue in 2019 was €6.8 billion. The company is family run, but it’s big and corporate, a departure from the Row, where Vanhée-Cybulski could talk to founders Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen easily. I ask if she ever has to fight for her ideas. “Yes,” she tells me, “because I’m a creative person, and I will take risks.” Such as? “I think it’s showing a much more sensual woman,” she says. “I feel like I can do it because I’m a woman.”
If there is a thread that runs through Vanhée-Cybulski’s designs, it’s a kind of intellectual sensuality. This past November, Hermès threw a “Grand Soir” to celebrate its Spring 2022 collection at a sprawling midcentury estate just outside L.A. that was once home to Frank Sinatra. It was one of the first over-the-top, celeb-filled fashion parties on the circuit since the start of the pandemic. Models paraded around a pool in midi-length dresses done in the supplest leather, with drawstring-waist skirts and bustier tops; there were even some crop tops and high-waisted wide-leg pants—an Hermès take on a Gen Z silhouette. To temper any self-seriousness, filmmaker Miranda July narrated the runway with absurdist humor. It was easy to picture actress Leslie Mann and her 19-year-old daughter, Iris Apatow, both of whom were in attendance, each wearing pieces from the collection.
Bringing the next generation into Hermès is something Vanhée-Cybulski thinks about. “It’s a sign of vitality if young women and men are coming and saying, ‘Hey, I like this,’ ” she says. But, she says, it is never so contrived; there are no marketing goals she has to contend with or age demographics to target. “If you put too much [emphasis on] analysis and algorithm, it’s a product, not an object anymore. … With an object, there is also imagination, desire, and pleasure.”
It’s much deeper than that. For Vanhée-Cybulski, the idea that Hermès can be “for everyone” is rooted in its history. “The idea of craftsmanship is not just excelling in a technique,” she explains. “It’s also the transmission of knowledge … and the transmission of an object from a mother to a child.”
Models: Iris Delcourt and Christie Munezero; Hair: Akemi Kishida for Oribe; Makeup: Vanessa Bellini; Manicures: Julie Villanova; Production: Concrete Rep.
This article originally appeared in the April 2022 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR, available on newsstands April 5.
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