Hair seems to be trending. This season, we’ve seen it worn as necklaces, as fringing on shoes, and at the Hermès show yesterday, it provided the inspiration for newly-bobbed Nadège Vanhee-Cybulksi’s AW23 womenswear collection. “It was about the sensuality of hair,” she explained after the show, which was held in a space that was entirely decked out in coppery auburn carpetry that resembled the colour of her own locks. Upon arrival, guests were served mini tarte-tatins and chocolate biscuits, with glasses of champagne to wash it down — a much more upmarket clue of what was to come than Nadège’s actual inspiration of supermarket aisles lined in varying boxes of hair dyes. “The different hair of women: red hair, blonde Venetians, jaded black,” she added, a smile on her face. “I wanted to play with the complexity of that symbolism and I wanted to take something so trivial and work it in a structural way.”
Who doesn’t obsess over hair? In the words of Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Fleabag: “Hair is everything — we wish it wasn’t so we could actually think about something else occasionally — but it’s the difference between a good day and a bad day.” The show opened with a handful of ultra-chic crimson-red — think Jessica Rabbit’s long Veronika Lake locks — lurex sweaters, silk skirts and shaved-shearling coats, a couple of which came complete with trapezoid-shaped bags made of horse hair, cinched by silver-dotted leather straps. They may have been the result of Nadège’s own story of how she recently cut her own hair; she tied it up and took to it with kitchen scissors. “Hair is about identity,” she reflected. “It’s a strong feminine attribute.”
“In history, hair was about power, seduction and magic — I wanted to work with that level of symbolism,” she continued. So, she created clothes that echoed natural hair tones, with a sense of fluidity that caressed the body. Panels of cashmere were wrapped across the shoulders and under the arms, around the back, the result of Nadège sending locks of hair to different production mills for them to replicate the fibre in the softest cashmere. “In the draping, I really wanted to think about how you twist your hair and break it and wear it,” she said. Towards the end of the show, a parade of Delphic dresses in Fortuny-like silk plissé pleats echoed brushed locks, occasionally glinting with monotone bugle beads (if only hair could look that shiny). There was plenty of outdoorsy coats and jackets, too, in leather and fluffy shearling (of course) and what can only be described as a general sense of ‘blanket dressing’; layers and panels of the most exquisite double-faced cashmere. Bermuda shorts were an unexpected motif (albeit in double-sided cashmere and leather) worn over square-toed suede boots. Silk jockey caps offered a tongue-in-cheek nod to horses’ mains, and harnessed Birkin bags, some of which came with leather fringing, seemed to suggest less preciousness than the cult bag’s obvious associations.
In terms of the clothes, it was all what Nadège described as “archetypes, maybe the most boring clothes on earth” — except, they were anything but. “I want to kind of bring this surprising creativity to them,” she enthused. “I want to keep this tradition of finding the right balance of the pattern and the fabric.” In a season in which designers have been extolling the virtues of good old fashion pattern-cutting, placing an emphasis on great, well-made clothes in lieu of over-the-top spectacle — Nadège’s words couldn’t be more apt. This is Hermès, after all. If anyone house is going to lead that conversation, it is this one.
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Images courtesy of Hermès