Hermès’s Desert Rave S/S'23 Show

“We’ve been so confined that I really wanted to celebrate going back outside, feeling the wind, the heat, the sweat on your skin,” said Hermès’s Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski, who erected a sand dune in the Tennis Club de Paris to show her latest performance-wear focused collection. Anders Christian Madsen reports.

The show imagined a rave in the desert

For all its classicism and sophistication, Hermès is one of the most eccentric institutions in the fashion industry. The Dumas family – which founded and still owns the company – are expert organisers and hosts, who have turned unpredictable entertainment into an art form. Anyone who’s ever been to an Hermès event knows this, and it’s why Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski’s rave theme didn’t seem so out of place in the world of Birkin bags and equestrian finery. “It was time to go out and release, let go, and celebrate togetherness and freedom, beyond space and time, and just… tripping!” she said after the show, which imagined “a rave in the desert”.

The set featured a massive sand dune

In the Tennis Club de Paris, Vanhee-Cybulski erected a massive sand dune and bathed it in kaleidoscopic lights. The reference was unmistakable: this was the great escape – for the mind as the body – somewhere in the Californian desert, dancing and mind-expanding and doing it all in Hermès. “When you dance you just want to have a freedom of the body,” she said. “We’ve been so confined that I really wanted to celebrate going back outside, feeling the wind, the heat, the sweat on your skin.” That desire created a collection founded in non-constriction, ease and performance elements.

It was founded in performance wear

“I took all the elements of the tent, the hammock – anything that is connected with outside activities,” Vanhee-Cybulski explained, referring to the trekking and hiking details that adorned garments, part functional and part decorative. It inspired dresses centred around the waist, the dress itself cut in two and beautifully tied together with strings evocative of the outdoor activities she was referencing. The idea segued into flags gracefully draped into dresses and tops, just barely manipulated into place. “All the dresses are about an idea of freedom and sensuality,” Vanhee-Cybulski said.

The sandals made models look like they were floating

It took a while for some of us to notice, but once you did, you couldn’t stop looking: every model wore sandals elevated on a semi-bouncy platform that had been hollowed out so, from the side, it looked a little bit like they were walking on air. “Pierre wanted to push the idea of floating in space,” Vanhee-Cybulski said, referring to Pierre Hardy who creates her footwear, “so he designed these carbon shoes that are outside of gravity.” They added a sci-fi sentiment to the show – like something out of Dune – which gave the collection a certain cutting edge.

It featured new 3D prints

The Hermès collection was an exercise in ingenious garment construction, but stripped of those concoctions, it was about exquisite, future-minded classics: beautiful, clean silhouettes structured from statuesque but lightweight coats, elongating trousers and boiler suits, and graphic 3D-printed dresses that functioned – ever so flatteringly – as optical illusions on the body.