Any number of locations in Los Angeles are spacious enough to house a fashion show. You could stage one at the Getty Center in Brentwood or on a soundstage in Studio City. Just a few weeks ago, Dior chose the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a backdrop for its show.
For Hermès, no existing structure sufficed for its first women’s fashion show in Los Angeles. On a hilltop in Bel Air, the French luxury house spent a month constructing a horizontal hanger of a runway. “Silhouettes on the Horizon,” a sign declared outside the entrance.
“This is stunning,” the singer Miley Cyrus said as she maneuvered to her seat, looking out over the city below. For the whole of the cocktail hour, scarf-draped clients craned over the steel railing, taking pictures of the verdant hilltop and postcard-perfect Spanish colonials across the way.
This show was the third of Hermès’s off-calendar fashion shows, which, employing a vernacular specific to the brand, it calls “Chapter Two.” First was New York in 2024, then Shanghai a year later. That two of these shows have occurred in the United States says much about the financial upside Hermès sees in a country where money is spent, and worn, liberally.
At the show, clients wiggled by with the flaps of their Birkin bags undone, as if primed to yank out their credit cards and swipe away. Two women passed wearing the same trompe l’oiled Hermès dress. I lost count of silk shirts patterned with straps and saddles.
“Of course, it’s business-driven,” Nadège Vanhée, the women’s artistic director of Hermès, said a few days before the show, referring to the label’s choice of Los Angeles. “When you start to have this idea of the collection in Shanghai or New York or L.A., the city or the place, the topography is going to take grip on your concept.”
Vanhée first came to Los Angeles in the 2000s, and returned during the three years she lived in New York as the creative director of the Row. That brief, buzz-stoking stint at the Olsen twins’ label put her on the radar of Axel Dumas, Hermès’s chief executive.
Vanhée, who has been at Hermès for 12 years, admired the ever-present newness of Los Angeles, its relentless reinvention. It is so unlike the northern French town she came from, a place where everyone knows just how ancient that church is, where the weight of history feels ever present.
“You don’t go to Culver City to see the first house of Culver City,” she said, signaling to the expanse of gray block warehouses just outside the window.
Vanhée made ginger nods to Los Angeles tropes. Or I at least hit on some connections: a leather jacket with accents culled from Hermès scarves looked like something Gram Parsons would have worn at the Whisky a Go Go. A candy-apple dress carried the shine of a waxed deuce coupe. And pantsuits, with kimono-like tie closures, were in the spirit of ’90s red carpets.
“I wanted to do something way more glamorous that you could expect in Paris,” Vanhée said. “Glamour here is the expression of beauty.”
But for the most part, these were polished, location-agnostic clothes: inky investment trenches, sleeveless gowns with Big Dipper sparkles and knife-edged leather trousers. In Los Angeles or Paris, the language of dressing well (and well-off) can be universal.
A run of pretty satin dresses with pleated skirts echoed the folds of a ballet slipper’s toe, an idea Vanhée got from … well, looking at a ballet flat.
“Deconstructing ballet slippers,” she said, “was a very interesting way of playing with construction.”
Vanhée took her bow wearing some very R.E.I.-functional yellow and red La Sportiva sneakers, not flats. But she did acknowledge that, in some regard, she is her own best target. She is, after all, one of the scant few women serving as women’s creative director at a luxury label, and her more than decade-long tenure well outpaces many of her Paris peers. (Hermès’s new men’s creative director, Grace Wales Bonner, will make her runway debut early next year.)
“Do I specifically design for me? Not necessarily,” Vanhée said, dressed in a brown leather Hermès jacket that had the goose-bumpy texture of a football. “Do I have an affinity with the woman I design for? Yes.”
