Hermès’s Nadège Vanhée Shares Her Inspirations

T Magazine|A Designer Inspired by Rock Music, the Architecture of Bridges and John Waters

Profile in Style explores the influences, references and fascinations that have shaped creative people.

According to Nadège Vanhée, the artistic director of women’s wear at Hermès, rock stars were her first brush with the fashion world. “Music was really instrumental for me,” says the designer, 46. “I’m from a provincial town in northern France; we didn’t have [much] exposure to culture.” As a teenager in the mid-1990s, she’d attend concerts by British and American acts like Moloko and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. “I’d go to flea markets to create looks [to wear to the shows],” she says, including, once, a black crepe dress layered over leather pants and worn with moccasins. But they were more than just outfits, she now knows: “I was really creating my identity.”

Vanhée was born to an Algerian mother and a French father in Seclin, a town of about 13,000 people near the Belgian border. When she was a child, she says, her parents were more concerned with her education than with creative pursuits. “They were much more rational,” she says. After graduating in 2003 from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, she worked at Maison Martin Margiela and under Phoebe Philo at Celine. In 2011, Vanhée relocated to New York when she was hired as the design director at the Row, where she stayed until Hermès came calling in 2014. Her role at the luxury fashion house, she says, involves being an interpreter of the historic brand’s codes — equestrian iconography, artisanal leatherwork — which she marries with her own varied interests: pioneers of modern dance like Pina Bausch and Trisha Brown and rock bands such as the Smiths.

Her fall 2024 collection for Hermès, which she calls the Rider, incorporated turtlenecks with rows of metal rivets inspired by motorcycle jackets, tightly belted burgundy trenches and ultra-high-waisted riding pants — all in leather. “It was about how I could make androgyny look sexy,” she says. “Hermès has existed for six generations, but there’s space to develop a vision for that heritage. It’s my job to connect the ideas of tradition and contemporaneity.”