High in the hills of Bel Air, Hermès staged its resort show for a crowd that included Miley Cyrus, Kerry Washington, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus last night. “LA is a place I love,” designer Nadège Vanhée said backstage. “It has the hint of old Europe mixed with the new world, it’s a place where you reinvent yourself, where you can explore everything.” The city’s possibilities yielded a strong outing from Vanhée, with long, languid velvet 1930s dresses and cocktail numbers in vivid satins among the stars of the show.
An acute observer pointed out that there’s a couture collection in Vanhée’s future. “What interests us in haute couture is know-how,” Axel Dumas, CEO of Hermès, said last year. About 5,600 miles from Paris, she gave it a sort of trial run, moving beyond the leather and silk scarves that are the house’s foundations.
An aerie of a pale yellow runway set was erected over the course of the last month in an open lot above the Hotel Bel Air. It required a golf cart ride up a steep incline to access (and, unfortunately, a long line waiting for said transportation when the show was over). “Silhouettes on the Horizon” was the poetic name Vanhée gave the collection, and it was a well-timed departure from recent seasons, which were too confined to body-con stretch leather shapes.
Here she was thinking of personal narratives—her own childhood fixation on ballet—and of cultural ones about Hollywood old and new. When a Frederic Sanchez remix of Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes” cued the show’s finale, Cyrus could be seen singing and dancing along from her spot on the front row. On the runway these references took the form of satin dresses whose gathers and piped seams echoed the construction of pointe shoes and skirt suits in the same material that with their nips and tucks struck a feminine, even coquettish, note. Spangled knit onesies in pale yellow or bright turquoise with flared legs were their showgirl opposite, and biker jackets in tooled and studded leather were similarly extroverted.
“We were looking for a sky because I think it’s really connected with this idea of having an open horizon; it’s like the promises of l’appel du large, of the beyond,” Vanhée said. It’s a tired cliché that California, on the far-left edge of the continent, on the precipice of the Pacific, is a place of potential, but in this case it proved true. This was the freest Vanhée’s clothes have looked in a while.
