Nadège Vanhée Built Hermès' Spring 2027 Show Around Air, With Leather Cut Into Strips and Parkas Turned Into Dresses

Hermès showed its Spring 2027 women's collection on Saturday, October 3, in a bright white space built inside the Garde Républicaine, the Paris home of the mounted gendarmes, according to Reuters. Nadège Vanhée, the house's womenswear creative director since 2014, organised the whole thing around one idea: air.

WWD quotes her explaining it: "Air can be perceptible, but also imperceptible, and I wanted to convert that idea into a very pragmatic silhouette." WWD says the idea came from a year of travel, in Los Angeles, Asia and a hot European summer, where she felt the heat herself. Her starting point was the parka, a practical piece that sits far from the house's usual codes. She turned it into dresses and skirts with sheer panels, some with small zips that shorten or lengthen them, in sunflower yellow, chocolate and Hermès orange.

What was on the runway

Reuters reports brown and black loose knits that showed bandeau tops beneath, mesh dresses with fine strips of leather worked into them, and leather skirts and dresses cut open into thigh-high slits. Trousers had side zips that could be left undone to let air through. Colour came from a bright orange parka worn over a knit mini dress, and from a zipped skirt in a shade Vanhée called sunflower yellow, matched with a high-collared jacket.

WWD adds a black leather blazer with pleats taken from ceiling-fan blades, a chocolate suede skirt lined in yellow silk, suede jackets full of perforations and knit dresses open enough to look like fishing nets, plus wide-leg trousers and jackets in very light denim and printed silk.

The accessories followed the same logic. Reuters saw cream leather buckets with open latticework, mostly flat, minimal sandals and the odd knee-high boot. WWD adds small buckets with fishnet details, cross-body bags, slim clutches and, on many models, heavy stacks of leather bracelets.

The weather was part of the show. Reuters says guests including Sofia Vergara and Emmy Rossum fanned themselves on an unusually warm, sunny October day. WWD says the room itself was hot, and that Vergara was using the show notes as a fan before the first model walked out.

Couture is next

The show lands between two bigger Hermès stories. In July, AFP reported that Hermès will present its first haute couture collection in January, designed by Vanhée, joining the official Couture Week schedule, January 25 to 28, as a guest member, the way Balenciaga did, with a possible application for the formal appellation later. Reuters notes the same collection is on the way and says the group is dealing with slower demand for luxury handbags and clothes, with its shares down 39% since the start of the year.

Read together, a ready-to-wear collection built on lightness, ventilation and open construction is a sensible way to show a leather house's range before it commits to the most formal craft program in fashion. The next test comes in January.