‘I’ve always been very exposed to this strange state of alienation,’ says Nadège Vanhée, the artistic director of Hermès’ womenswear collections. After moving to Antwerp to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in her twenties – the school that had memorably birthed the Antwerp Six, among them Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck and Dries Van Noten – for the next 15 years, she would largely live outside of her native France. First, there was a stint at Delvaux in Brussels, then Maison Martin Margiela in Paris, before joining Phoebe Philo at Celine in London. In 2011, she moved to New York, becoming design director at Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s then-burgeoning label, The Row.
So the role at Hermès – one of France’s best-known luxury exports and an emblem of Parisian style – marked something of a homecoming for Vanhée. But, as she sits amid objects from the house’s 16 métiers (there is a ceramic dining set, trails of jewellery and, of course, plenty of handbags) in Hermès’ sunlit showroom on Rue d’Anjou, she says that she still feels like something of an outsider in her home country. She calls English her ‘sentimental creative language’. ‘I always feel like I have been floating between the two,’ she says.
