Nadège Vanhée on Bringing Hermès to Los Angeles—and Into Couture

There aren’t many Birkin bags or Hermès scarves to be spotted on this barren stretch of Jefferson Boulevard in South Los Angeles, where a plumbing supply shop and a liquor store dominate the cityscape. But inside the bright, paint-splotched studio of artist Calida Rawles, Nadège Vanhée, the artistic director of women’s ready-to-wear at Hermès, seems very much at home. It’s Vanhée’s first visit to the workshop of the L.A.-based Rawles, who is best known for her paintings of Black figures submerged in water. As Rawles discusses a couple of her recent works and half-finished canvases, Vanhée listens intently, occasionally voicing her own musings about time and space, stillness and movement. She’s fascinated by some fragments of window screens that Rawles has been threading with dried bits of acrylic paint. On a worktable are a few small paintings with abstract inkblot-like forms that spark Vanhée’s observations about Rorschach tests—and about women’s belt buckles. As the visit winds down, Vanhée tells Rawles about the 19th-century avant-garde painter Paul Sérusier and some other must-sees at the Musée d’Orsay. Then she discreetly steps aside with an Hermès colleague, using her phone to select three makeup products: eye pencils in shades of blue and green that she wants to send Rawles as a gift. “The colors go very well with the work,” Vanhée says, smiling.

At Hermès, Vanhée has spent 12 years looking for imaginative ways to explore the confluence of style and substance. But in a fashion world brimming with big personalities and chronic over-posters, she has managed to maintain a certain aura of mystery. To those who don’t know her, Vanhée’s Gallic air of cool self-possession (picture a 40-something Isabelle Huppert with a Bolide bag) can seem either enigmatic or intimidating, depending on the observer’s level of insecurity. Still, her background in the art world, along with her obvious zeal for the thrills of the creative process, reveals a lot about what drives her. It also helps explain her attraction to Los Angeles, where she landed in March to soak up the cultural scene in preparation for the major Hermès runway show that happened on June 4.

“Nadège is an artist herself,” Rawles tells me later. “You can see it in how she looks at details, how she understands the work, how her eyes light up at certain things.”

Indeed, when Vanhée and I sit down for drinks at the Hotel Bel-Air after the studio visit, she immediately admits to some nostalgia for her days as a student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, in Antwerp. “I always get excited when I see the workshop of a sculptor or a painter, where it’s almost as if the cerebral becomes physical,” she says. Raised in a small town in France’s provincial far north, she enrolled at the prestigious art and fashion school in the late 1990s, more than a decade after it had gained fame as the launching pad of designers like Dries Van Noten, Martin Margiela, and Ann Demeulemeester. When she applied, in her early 20s, Vanhée hadn’t yet learned to properly draw. “I don’t want to sound vain, but I’m almost sure they accepted me because of the way I looked at the interview,” she says. “I wore this chartreuse leather jacket that wasn’t finished—it was a half-prototype, maybe from a Claude Montana sample sale. It was so beautiful.” Tasked with drawing a classical bust for the designer Walter Van Beirendonck and the admissions committee, Vanhée got around her lack of drafting skills by trying a bold gambit: “I thought, You know what? I’m going to ditch the pen.” She used collage to craft her own version of the bust using scissors, Post-its, and cutouts from magazine pages.

That instinctive knack for reimagining the classics has come in very handy for Vanhée at Hermès. The family-owned luxury brand has had a remarkably successful run in recent years and is currently one of the world’s most valuable companies, worth around $200 billion. At a moment when concerns are growing everywhere about society’s overreliance on technology, it’s no surprise that customers are drawn to a house that was founded in 1837 and remains committed to meticulous craftsmanship and the finest materials. Every Hermès bag is still hand-stitched by an individual artisan in the company’s atelier on the outskirts of Paris; Vanhée’s clothing designs put a contemporary spin on the supplest leathers and silkiest silks, always with garments that beg to be touched. “The hand connects us, you know?” Vanhée says. “I touch your hand, you touch my hand, we connect. But the hand is also able to write with a pen, so it’s such an important part of our human identity.” When she first got to Hermès, she recalls, “I think we were celebrating craftsmanship as an idea about heritage. And today it’s almost a contemporary position. You anchor yourself to the work by hand.”

Anyone who spends more than a few minutes with Vanhée will notice her tendency to frame her thoughts in conceptual dualities. Whether she’s discussing a Talking Heads album cover or her design philosophy, she gravitates to themes such as function versus fantasy, or exposure versus concealment. And when it comes to intriguing contrasts, few cities can compete with Los Angeles, where great beauty and unabashed tackiness are engaged in a perpetual tug-of-war.

Vanhée chose the city for what Hermès is calling chapter two of its fall 2026 collection. The first chapter debuted during Fashion Week at the Paris headquarters of the Republican Guard, which Vanhée transformed into a moody, mossy landscape. (Unlike most major houses, Hermès doesn’t do resort collections, but this is its third annual big-deal road show, following one in Shanghai last year and another in New York in 2024.) For the L.A. iteration, Vanhée opted to go cinematic and colorful, in a distinctly Hermès kind of way. Inspired by the grace of a dancer who rigorously refines her performance through gestures that she perfects over time, Vanhée says, the collection explores “the quiet tension between discipline and ease.” Jumpsuits in soft pastels (a nod to ballet slippers) alternate with sleek dresses in bold red and green shades that evoke glamour-puss lipstick or vintage Cadillac convertibles. Black leather silhouettes with elaborate marquetry allude to Hollywood’s darker, more mysterious side.

“L.A. is the land of creativity, but it’s also the land of forging your identity,” she says. “You come here to look for who you are.” A major influence from the archive is a foulard by Caty Latham, who spent decades creating scarves at Hermès. The foulard itself is an assemblage of 20 of Latham’s previous designs, which Vanhée sees as a symbol for the sprawl of L.A., with “all these different neighborhoods connected together.”

Vanhée’s attitude about Californians who go to restaurants in sweatpants or leisurewear is notably unjudgy; she seems determined not to be the sort of Frenchwoman who sneers at a tourist’s ill-chosen outfit from her seat on a café terrace. “I don’t have this pattern where I see good taste or bad taste,” she says. “I like to see people’s individual sensibilities through their clothes. There’s never something wrong with what they wear. It’s almost like, Why did they do this? What is the motive behind it? What happened?”

She is especially struck by the way L.A. women can easily shift back and forth between an awards gala and a morning hike along the coast. “They have this ultraglamorous face that they can put on, and then they can turn into this very natural girl,” she says. Lauren Hutton is one of Vanhée’s enduring favorites. “And definitely Anjelica Huston. She has this double thing.” It’s a particularly American dichotomy, similar to one that Vanhée already explored at The Row, where she was design director from 2011 to 2014, working under Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen in New York. “With Mary-Kate and Ashley, we were always converging on this combination of sophistication and ease,” she says. “It was something that I was naturally inclined to do.”

During Vanhée’s whirlwind swing through L.A. in March, her focus was not on celebrities or Hollywood power brokers but on local artists and creatives. In addition to Rawles’s studio, she visited the Venice space of video artist Doug Aitken; the downtown gallery Vielmetter (where painter Whitney Bedford, an old friend, is on the roster); and the Charles & Ray Eames Foundation, the midcentury mecca in the Pacific Palisades that narrowly escaped destruction during last year’s catastrophic wildfires. “L.A. celebrates individuality, but at the same time I really felt this sense of collective responsibility,” she says. “I think the fires really struck something.” After witnessing how dozens of designers, architects, and artists not only made big contributions to relief organizations but also personally stepped up to replace lost furniture and help rebuild homes, Vanhée rethought some of her own priorities. She says that when she got back to Paris, where she lives near Pigalle, “it gave me an idea of, What if I can connect with people in a different way? What if I can be more supportive in different fields?”

Last year, Hermès announced that it is putting Vanhée in charge of its most ambitious venture in years: a new haute couture atelier. She speaks carefully about the project, since it’s “still embryonic.” Right now, she says, “we are busy with logistics, because if we do couture we have to do it according to the rules.” The Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode has strict codes regulating such things as the amount of space in a workshop, the number of artisans, and the tools and materials that can be used. For a brand that already outranks most of its rivals when it comes to craftsmanship and exclusivity, couture will likely deepen Hermès’s commitment to artisanal know-how while luring in an even more rarefied clientele. “The idea is to have the ultimate gesture of handmaking,” Vanhée says. “Each piece is going to be one of a kind and belong to one person.”

Even in her new role as a couturier, however, Vanhée is unlikely to abandon her conviction that great style can be expressed in unexpected, sometimes humble ways. She recalls a favorite L.A. moment during her trip, when the city’s laid-back spirit was working its charms. One morning, she had just sat down for breakfast at the counter in the famed Fountain Coffee Room—the restaurant on the lower level of the Beverly Hills Hotel—when she realized she’d forgotten her glasses. She started squinting her way through the pancake options on the menu, until the server did something surprising. “She lent me her glasses!” Vanhée says incredulously. “I thought that was really chic.”

Hair by Anthony Turner at Jolly Collective; makeup by Lynsey Alexander at Jolly Collective; manicure by Hanaé Goumri at Walter Schupfer Management. Model: Kristen McMenamy at the Lions Management. Casting by Ashley Brokaw. Set design by Alexander Bock at Streeters.

Produced by Brachfeld; Executive Producer: Clément Camaret; Production Coordinator: Liliana Della Porta; Lighting Director: Antoni Ciufo; Photo Assistants: Thomas Vincent, Yves Mourtada; Digital Technician: Aurentin Girard at Imagin Productions; Retouching: Imagin Productions; Fashion Assistant: Elfé Baroso-Bertrand; Production Assistants: Fanny Carpentier, Gwenaëlle Michau, Rose Bernard; Hair Assistant: John Allan; Makeup Assistant: Fernanda Paz.