Here’s a small sense of how revered Hermès is by other fashion designers: A few hours after the Hermès fashion show on Saturday, just après-midi, I visited the showroom of the Japanese brand A.Presse. There, the designer, Kazuma Shigematsu, told me, unprompted, that he collected pieces from the Hermès back catalog.
“I love French vintage,” Mr. Shigematsu said. To be transparent, that didn’t just include Hermès: Mr. Shigematsu also name-checked Charvet, the purveyor of regal dress shirts.
But, it was the Hermès name drop that made Mr. Shigematsu’s four-year-old brand click for me. The showroom was a carousel of lambskin leather jackets lined in waffley cashmere, bombers made not from utilitarian nylon but from aristocratic washed silk, jeans chiseled like the elusive “perfect” Levi’s you waste your life questing for.
“I don’t like fashion,” Mr. Shigematsu said, by way of explanation of his work. “I’m looking for a new word.”
These were clothes that sang with their simplicity, that reflected confidence, not chaos. They were cheat codes for dressing smarter. All attributes I could easily say of Hermès.
A.Presse was the brand that I had been hearing about all week. “You have to get there,” I’d been told. I could see why.
The Hermès of today functions at a vastly different scale than the humble A.Presse showroom. At 188 years old, and firmly-rooted as an outfitter of choice for the Forbes 500, Hermès is a well-oiled, multimillion-dollar machine. You’ve got the celebs in the front row: Odell Beckham Jr.; Peter Sarsgaard; and Cord Jefferson, the Oscar-winning screenwriter, attending his first fashion show in a herringbone Hermès topcoat.
Mr. Jefferson said he enjoyed the show afterward. Hard not to when you’re wearing the brand.
The Very Important Clients are easy to spot as they point to their favored garments streaming down the runway, making mental notes on ordering that turtleneck and this leather. And then there is the brand’s men’s creative director Véronique Nichanian, who defies an industry obsessed with new, new, new, having been at her post for more than 35 years.
“I try to design clothes to make men seductive and comfortable and happy,” the ever-genial Ms. Nichanian said in an interview before the show.
Like all collections, this one included those abiding pillars of the rich-guy dress code: a camel walking coat with a throat-latched collar (perfect, I imagine, for when it gets nippy in Davos), pin-sharp chinos and all sorts of cashmere knits. A spartan double-breasted suit worn with a white shirt and tie was just the outfit for a Hermès guy who needs to face his board and tell them that this quarter, surprise, surprise, earnings are up again.
The hulking Haut à Courroies bags, like Birkins on creatine, were plentiful. Don’t look up their price unless you are interested in a heart attack.
But tucked in this collection were those moments of sprightly ingenuity that make you think this had to come from a brand one-fiftieth the age of Hermès, one with some hungry, new creative director looking to make a mark.
A grouping of long coats produced from piqué cotton had been waxed to glisten like a grand piano. Several models wore knit hoods that fell somewhere between Little Red Riding Hood and an “Alien” movie. I wish I could have grabbed one before going back out into a damp, cool day in Paris. (“I should really get into hoods” is the exact sort of delirious thought you have as a fashion critic rounding the final corner of the fashion-week sprint.)
Near the end came a couplet of suits in velvet. They fit exactly as a suit should today: sitting dead-on at the shoulder but spacious through the torso and with some laissez-faire flow to the trousers. It’s just the sort of design that a brand like A.Presse will look to for inspiration in 30 years or so.
