Hermès Fall-Winter 2025: A Thoroughbred Triumph in Shanghai
By Meredith Damouni
Let’s just say, there are fashion shows, and then there are Hermès moments—laconic in tone, opulent in execution, and unerringly precise in their articulation of quiet power. On a sultry Friday evening in June, Shanghai's North Bund Bay played host to such a moment, as Nadège Vanhée presented the second chapter of her Fall-Winter 2025 women’s collection for the house.
Set against the hyper-modern skyline of Lujiazui, with the Huangpu River acting as both muse and mirror, Hermès erected a modular pavilion—architecture as metaphor, a space of shifting thresholds, transparency, and containment. It was a venue that suggested porosity between past and future, nature and city, East and West. Fitting, then, that Vanhée’s vision this season was not a collection so much as a sartorial cartography: a mapping of what it means to be cosmopolitan, competent, and quietly seductive in a world of elegant contradictions.
The show, titled Au Galop! (At a Gallop), was much less about pace than poise. There was of course, movement, certainly—fluid ponchos, enveloping coats, and modular pieces that zipped and folded with a kind of tactile intelligence—but what lingered was the profound stillness at the core of the clothes. This was fashion as infrastructure, not spectacle.
At the heart of it all: the braid. A humble motif, one could say perhaps, but in Vanhée’s hands it became a palimpsest—equine, artisanal, cross-cultural, and subtly futuristic. Drawn from the Dressage Tressage carré by Virginie Jamin, it threaded its way through the show with understated insistence: braided leather trims on coats, twisted cords edging quilted knits, or embossed motifs nestled into the soft yield of the most delicate cashmere. The braid here was not just decoration but narrative—heritage pulled taut into the present, and oh so relevant.
Hermès is never about shouting, and yet this collection spoke volumes in the nuanced language of construction. The outerwear—arguably the spine of the offering—was engineered with a military-like intelligence. Double-faced cashmere coats, lined with detachable silk panels, seemed to inhale and exhale with their wearer. Ponchos, rendered in tones that evoked terracotta clay, lichen, and soot, were both shell and skin: protective yet light, almost weightless in movement.
This season’s palette was a lesson in controlled heat. There were deep, barn-door reds, burnished oranges, and the earthy elegance of saddle brown, all tempered by wistful lilacs and ceramic whites. Inky navy served as a foil throughout—reminding us that Hermès, even when playful, never loses its gravitas.
Perhaps the most compelling quality of the collection was its beautiful tension: between equestrian romance and utilitarian rigour; between heritage and invention; between fluidity and form. A blouson might recall a 1970s French skiwear silhouette, yet its cut whispered Bauhaus restraint. Knitwear—braided, looped, or padded—was as athletic as it was artisanal. Leather was present, of course, but softened, quilted, or layered with technical fabric as though to ask: What if protection could also be sensual?
Image courtesy of Hermès
Where some designers traffic in fantasy, Vanhée traffics in subtle provocation. Her silhouettes do not seduce through exposure, but through control—precision-cut trousers that hug just so, anoraks that cinch at the waist with a whisper of tension, skirts that move like horsehair in wind. The effect is one of confident sensuality—not the desire to be seen, but the knowledge of being.
There is something almost philosophical about Vanhée’s Hermès. In a world addicted to immediacy, she offers permanence. In a digital age, she speaks through touch. And in an industry racing toward spectacle, she rides side-saddle, gracefully ahead of the pack.
After the show, the pavilion gave way to celebration: a sensory installation in colour, a surprise musical act, a kind of synesthetic coda to the evening. But the true resonance lingered in the clothes—a gesture, a cut, a braided trim—each an ode to slowness, mastery, and the extraordinary pleasure of dressing with intent.
As the lights of Shanghai flickered across the river and the crowd dispersed into the night, one thing was clear: Vanhée’s Hermès woman is not chasing the future. She is already there—at a gallop, yes—but never out of breath, and always divine.