In her 12th year at Hermès, Nadège Vanhée cut leather into strips, slits and vents built for heat, then let open knits and bra tops pull the argument toward everyone else’s runway

PARIS — Nadège Vanhée’s Hermès spring 2027 collection, shown Saturday morning at the Garde Républicaine, set itself an engineering brief: how a house built on saddle leather dresses a client for summers that keep getting hotter. Vanhée, artistic director of women’s ready-to-wear since 2014, said a year spent in Los Angeles, Asia and Europe led her to organize the season around air. The palette opened in ivory and icy blue and closed on sunflower yellow, tomato red and Hermès orange.

The collection answered its own question best where it was most literal about construction. When leather was cut, slit, or laid in strips so air could pass through it, the brief became a house technique. When Vanhée reached for sheer knits and lingerie styling to signal heat, Hermès traded its argument for the season’s.

Hermès Spring 2027 Ready-to-Wear at Paris Fashion Week

Leather Strips on Silk Mesh Carry the Argument

Silk mesh dresses were covered in panels of fine leather strips, turning the hide from a shell into something closer to fringe. Midi-length leather dresses and skirts were slashed into strips to the thigh, and perforated suede jackets kept the material while removing its mass. These are the pieces only the Hermès ateliers could make, and the ones that converted a weather report into a construction method.

The designer cited ceiling-fan blades as the source for the pleating run through a black leather blazer and a chocolate suede skirt backed in yellow silk. A pleated leather jacket is a harder technical proposition than a sheer dress. It was also the more convincing answer to the brief.

The Parka Makes a Weaker Foundation Than the Saddle

A second strand started from the parka: dresses and skirts with sheer panels and zips that raise or drop the hem, silk parkas that convert to gilets and a billowing orange parka over a knit minidress. Vanhée described the goal as “a very pragmatic silhouette.”

Pragmatism here meant adjustability, and adjustability is a feature, not a silhouette. A zip that takes a chiffon skirt from long to short gives the client two lengths and spares the designer from committing to one proportion. The slashed leather skirts committed; the zipped ones hedged.

Open Knits and Bra Tops Borrow the Season’s Script

Open-knit dresses in brown, black and ivory went over bandeau and bra tops, and a carré was knotted into a strapless bandeau above belted midi skirts. Framed as ventilation, this was the collection’s least specific idea. Sheer knit over visible underpinnings asks nothing of the leather expertise the rest of the show was built to demonstrate.

It is also a commercial narrowing. Hermès sells to a client who waits years for a Kelly, and a netted dress over a bra top addresses a smaller slice of her garde-robe than a slashed leather skirt does. The accessories muddied the premise further: stacks of thick leather cuffs and knee-high leather boots sat uneasily in a collection about shedding weight.

A Sunset Finale Arrives Four Passages Late

The color sequence ran ivory and icy blue, then camel with black and reddish brown, then terra-cotta, chocolate, and sand, then slate gray, black, and dark brown before the yellow, red, and orange finale. That is four neutral passages before the payoff. The slate-and-brown block directly ahead of the finale restated the earlier browns rather than building toward the color, so the brightest looks, including the zipped sunflower skirt with its matching high-collared jacket, played as a coda instead of a conclusion.

Ready-to-Wear Still Trails the Bags at Hermès

The accessories did much of the selling: cream leather bucket bags in open latticework, duffel-style backpacks, crossbodies, flat thong sandals and knee-high moccasin boots. That weighting matters for a sector that has lagged. Ready-to-wear and Accessories rose 2 percent at constant exchange rates in the first half of 2026, to 2.2 billion euros, and fell 2.5 percent on a reported basis, according to the company’s July 29 results, while Leather Goods and Saddlery grew 10 percent at constant rates. Hermès credited ready-to-wear momentum for the sector’s 3.6 percent second-quarter gain, but the sector also includes belts and costume jewelry, and the results do not separate clothing from the accessoires. With shares down 39 percent this year and Vanhée’s first couture collection due Jan. 25 to 28, the open question is which of those categories this collection was really built to carry.

Vanhée made its strongest case on Saturday in leather that let air through; its weakest, in clothes that only let skin show. For a house whose entire proposition is craft, that is not a fine distinction.

See the complete collection below: