PANTIN, France – As a child, Nadège Vanhee was discouraged from wearing red: It would match her hair, she was told. But since her first collection for Hermès in 2015, she has embraced the colour, using it like another inky black. Sensuous and radical.

In 20 seasons, Vanhee has gradually reinvented Hermès’ ready-to-wear collections, working from the inside out without gimmicks or parody. There are no celebrity muses, rather, inspirations roam from urban to country landscapes, from horses to motorbikes. Earth tones, taupy greys and buttery beige become newly desirable alongside her signature reds.

Construction meets fluidity, starting with a deep respect and understanding of material. Then comes the cut, with volumes informed by gestures: “Zipping a collar, a skirt, buckling an overcoat, tightening the cords on a rain jacket,” Vanhee says. The action comes before the image.

Born in 1978 in northern France, Vanhee made her debut at Martin Margiela, then at Celine under Phoebe Philo, before joining The Row in New York. In 2014, she was named artistic director of Hermès women’s ready-to-wear.

Vanhee’s collections are discreet but remarkable, anchored in a brand history that she seeks neither to erase nor to reduce to mere signifiers. From silk twill to stirrup belts, each element of the Hermès DNA is present, but metamorphosed, as in her Autumn/Winter 2025 biker jacket whose stitching echoes the construction of a saddle.

Vanhee met The Business of Fashion in Hermès’ Pantin studio, where colours and craftsmanship maintain a fusional relationship. Work on collections begins years in advance, as part of a dialogue across Hermès sixteen métiers including shoes, bags, silk and, since 2020, beauty. Not to mention the upstream work that goes into maintaining Hermès’ legendary standards for product development and quality.

At Hermès, Vanhee returns a certain grandeur to French ready-to-wear. Her faith in the power craftspeople, united by shared vocabulary and values, recalls a bygone era.

And yet rigorous design and production are mixed with a rebellious spirit, rejuvenating the notion of feminine elegance with lighter, more body-conscious silhouettes for a woman in motion.

In her Spring/Summer 2025 collection set to be shown during Paris Fashion Week on Saturday, colours inspired by the house’s iconic leathers are recast as paints in an artist’s palette. Skin tones like ebony, chestnut, camel and gold are punctuated with vibrant hues like bougainvillaea pink.

The collection, dedicated to the artist’s studio as a space of creation, reinforces and supports an increasingly singular point of view.

Laurence Benäim: A word to describe Hermès’ Spring/Summer 2025 collection? What was your starting point?

Nadège Vanhee: Sensual. For me, sensuality means skin, the epidermis. The flesh tones in the collection recall leather, evoking a sense of touch. There’s a very carnal idea of summer; the body is revealed. There’s transparency and lightness, while fluid knits express a symbiosis with the body.

I started with the artist’s studio as a place to celebrate creation. Looking at artists, notably women. I thought about studio uniforms, and how an apron tied around the hips means something different in the context of the atelier. An evocation of freedom, with pockets.

At Hermès, all the colours have something to do with the skin. I didn’t want to stifle the collection by using the colours of uniforms, but rather to uncover their sensual aspect.

You’ve been designing Hermès’ women’s ready-to-wear collections for 10 years now. How have your collections changed?

I prefer to speak of evolution rather than rupture. When I started out, I was familiar with leather, but I had kept it at arm’s length. Here, I discovered a vocabulary, a way of working with this living, singular material. A methodology combined with a sense of respect.

It took time to build the team. Today there are 17 of us in the ready-to-wear studio, and each collection is created in synergy with the company’s other métiers, starting with shoes, because a silhouette without shoes is impossible. Then I work with the leather goods and silk teams. It takes at least two years of fine-tuning.

The famous “temps Hermès...”

It’s the time it takes to combine expertise in function and aesthetics. It’s a rhythm that leads me to work further upstream, with a sense of teamwork pushed to the extreme.

The jeans in this collection were washed, softened, and woven in Japan over a year ago.

What drives you forward in your work?

What I’m looking for is beauty. It’s a quest. An aesthetic emotion that touches on sensuality — that’s what keeps me going.

I love exploring the colours of leather associated with the earth, with nature. The older I get, the more I realise that I was influenced by childhood visits to Algeria: Algiers, the Hoggar desert, the Aurès mountains.

Then there’s updating a living heritage, creating a lineage between the art of the tailor and the saddler. And always provoking surprises, with more transparency and lightness.

Hermès’ equestrian roots are always present. How do you go about incorporating the equestrian spirit?

Equestrian references are a starting point, not a goal. It’s about finding elements in the archives that can be transposed analytically rather than literally.

Your obsession?

My mission, my vision is to reveal the assertiveness of the Hermès woman: the inventiveness, the creativity, this spirit of research, discovery, the magnetism of a presence. It’s these values, these assets that seduce and charm.

Every season we reshuffle the deck and come up with new combinations. The aim is to propose a vision that doesn’t crush individuality and manages to go beyond the clichés of androgyny. To take a classic garment — a trench coat, a blouson — and make it desirable today. To make a garment as beautiful as a bag.

Celebrating an attitude, references to women I’m drawn to like [photographer and actress] Alice Springs, and other inspiring pioneering figures.

Which bag, if you had to choose one?

That’s difficult. I’d say the Plume, the Trim or the Kelly.

How do you reconcile the notion of fashion with the Hermès ethos of timeless style?

Style and fashion cross and uncross. The Hermès style is recognisable, and it feeds off fashion to meet new needs, new functions, new points of view. Claude Brouet, Christophe Lemaire, Martin Margiela, Jean-Paul Gaultier: each brought his own identity, whether in prints or shapes. But the company is bigger than fashion.

I’m very lucky to work for a company whose heritage goes back six generations. It’s not cumbersome. It’s a story of cut, function, discipline, and seduction. It’s a special relationship between the craftsman who assembles the garment, and the person who’s going to wear it, for life. That’s the magic recipe.

What do you see as the brand’s greatest strengths?

The strength of this brand lies in its deeply rooted values. It’s a discipline. We’re talking about hyper-demanding quality, transmission, and style. Then there’s audacity, a search for playfulness and lightness. This company is a beehive of ideas in perpetual proliferation.

In my collections, I dig deeper into this research, combining it with the ideals of movement and sensuality.

In recent years, I think more than just an evolution there’s been a clarification of what Hermès fashion is. It’s as if I were an amplifier.

Any words of advice?

Free yourself to assert yourself, leave space for intuition. I was 19 with a literary degree, I decided to go into design. As a redhead, I was already used to getting some snide remarks, to being ostracised for being slightly different. As a child, I wasn’t allowed to wear red; I was told it didn’t go with my hair. Today, I collect red dresses. They’re like characters.

Editors’ Note: This conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.