Ringing out the Paris collections on Wednesday, Christophe Lemaire will take his final bow at Hermès as he steps back to focus on his own label. So it wasn’t so surprising, perhaps, that he and partner Sarah-Linh Tran had gone all out in the eponymous department this season, taking out the panoramic great hall of the Bibliothèque nationale de France for a show, which epitomised the sleek luxe of which the couple are king and queen.
“If you had this carpet at home,” a guest noted as plastic covers were pulled off the huge runway’s velvety ivory carpet, “no one could ever come inside your house.” Lemaire and Tran would no doubt disagree – after all, they’re quite casual about their luxury – but much like the clothes they design, the carpet echoed the precise perfection and flawless elegance that make you a little bit scared of touching it and messing up its pristine chi. If it sounds stuffy, it’s not. Lemaire’s collection was – to use a much overused word, which actually makes sense here – effortless in its clean-cut separates, styled without fuss and without glitz but so impossibly chic and Parisian in its nature (and manufacture) that the opulence was dripping off it.
One of those impossibly chic women who wear Christophe Lemaire is Tran’s mother, who sat front row: a kind of German Catherine Deneuvre of the type you sometimes see in the streets of Paris. Cool, cultured and unaffected, she was a reminder of the label’s very real customer and why there’s a very good reason Lemaire should ascend to new heights in his solo career.
Credits
Text Anders Christian Madsen
Photography Harry Carr