How Hermès’ triptych performance for fall/winter 2021 celebrated movement and women

The first week of March is a flurry for the fashion community—airports, meetings, meals on the go, tired feet, scribbles of notes and seemingly endless invites to keep track of. As travel and gatherings continue to be at various stages of impasse, the industry has adapted to virtual offerings of a similar experience. For a business that thrives on creativity the lack of movement and in-person spontaneous interactions feels like a vital organ being cut off. “I didn’t want to express the melancholy or the withdrawal, intrinsic to this period. On the contrary I’d say my reaction was resistance, thinking, I shall not succumb to the complete erasure of individuality,” says Nadège Vanhée-Cybulski, artistic director, women’s ready-to-wear, Hermès in a mini documentary film about the coming together of the fall/winter 2021 collection. “Starting a collection almost feels sacred. It’s a ritual,” she says. Focusing on movement, Vanhée-Cybulski constructed a three-part show that simultaneously unfolded in three cities—New York, Paris and Shanghai.

Hermès’ invite to the triptych transported viewers into the world of the French luxury house where every detail, from the intensity of amplitude to the fall of skirts mid-motion, was attended to. Vanhée-Cybulski worked along with choreographers Madeline Hollander and Gu Jiani to interpret the collection. What does a New Yorker’s walk in freestyle look like? What is the experience of being a woman? Forces of creativity and intuitive characterisation themselves, Hollander and Jiani added their own energies to the final work. Vanhée-Cybulski’s imagination got poetic about pleating and aimed to create clothing that would make the Hermès’ woman want to step out after months of staying in. It’s never about flash this luxury house—the messaging is far more subtle. The fabrics used are evocative of shelter and protection. There’s flexibility and restraint in the collection. There’s luxury in the make, in the sense that the garments honour women for who they can be and not purely for aesthetic qualities that can be attributed to them.

Finding answers to her own needs of creative dialogue, the artistic director found perfect collaborators in the movement experts. “For Shanghai, there was an attraction to tradition, but for New York I didn’t have a precise idea. I knew I didn’t want the performance to resemble the show too closely; that was all. I was interested in Madeline’s obsession with gesture. I thought it would be a perfect way to open the triptych, and I was curious to see how she was going to make the collection her own, interpret it before the show was produced. I am interested in the relationship between clothes, bodies, and attitudes; these are the things I think of when I begin designing a new collection. I had been fascinated by one of Madeline’s choreographies, “52 Final Bows”, which was the inspiration for the curtains. My collaboration with Gu Jiani was predicated on the physical, whereas Madeline’s approach is more theoretical: the conceptual basis of the project and its structure are in fact revealed in her work. She was the ideal partner for the opening. In retrospect, I realise that the difference of those two approaches inspired the collection as it was being made,” she elaborates.

As the curtains lifted—Vanhee-Cybulski’s reference point was the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks meets the ceremonial lifting of drapes before a big performance, the flow of the dancers followed by the show itself was in perfect synch. Textures of leather in the same tone, denim edged with more leather, graphic contrasts of line, the clothes remained distinctly Hermès. “The idea was female sensuality completely re-appropriated. Women’s sensuality was forever described, filmed, photographed, and painted by men. The choreographers we approached were women. This was not fortuitous. We are living in a time when women need to take control of the narrative, express their sensuality as they see fit, far from all stereotypes. It is an ongoing process—and a wonderful challenge—for today’s women, and for fashion,” she explains. There more than one way of expressing one’s feminist ideology, and there are no doubts which team Vanhee-Cybulski is rooting for.

As we become hyper-aware of the fragility of the human race, we are also raising our consciousness in celebrating our differences. “We are all caught up in a moment of reflection about what we can do better, and differently. We need to rethink certain things positively; if not, all the questioning linked to the pandemic will have been fruitless. We can and must welcome different sensibilities into our own work,” she says.

“The moment we are currently experiencing is important because it is changing everything we think we know. We are rethinking our connection to other people. We have an increasingly local focus, which is both constraining as well as a wonderful opportunity—that we have attempted to weave into this triptych: we in Paris, Madeline in New York, Gu Jiani in Shanghai. And it is vital that each participant has a strictly personal and intimate approach to where they live and to what is happening now. Would we have created this new vocabulary, these socially-distanced collaborations if things had been calmer, more normal? Probably not. We would have undoubtedly produced a more traditional show. We want to comprehend the moment and invent new ways of working together.”

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