The “little thing” in question is a Faubourg Birkin 20, the smallest and perhaps rarest of the brand's globally coveted handbags, decorated like the facade of the flagship store, with a cute orange leather sunshade and a little shopping bag attached to the handle. Sotheby's says the bag sold for a priceless $30,000 and fetched an even more attractive $180,000 on the second-hand market.
The observer, one of the guests whose shopping habits had earned her a seat at the show, held a slightly oversized Birkin 25 in her manicured fingers. She breathed in and out deeply, trembling with nerves as if she were facing a famously elusive celebrity or the tastiest but most elusive prey.
The occasion for this big hunt was the Hermès women's show, the first public showing of a new collection outside Paris, staged as the second chapter of the Fall 2024 collection shown in the French fashion capital in March.
“Why New York?” Nadège Vanhe, artistic director of women's ready-to-wear at Hermès, mused moments before. She paired a shrunken T-shirt with skin-tight leather pants and scrunchie ankle boots (all Hermès). Her curly red hair was slicked back and tucked behind her ear. “This collection really reflects the spirit of New York,” she said. Before coming to Hermès, Vanhe was the designer for Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen's quirky luxury label, The Row, and “I developed my aesthetic by living in the city.”
And the Americans Love Hermes.
“The American consumer is starting to understand sophistication and appreciate more eccentric pieces,” said Zachary Kowal by phone this week. His family-run boutique, Cuffs, in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, has been carrying the Hermès line since the late 1980s. (Cuffs is the brand's only wholesale account in the world and the only Hermès location in Ohio.) While other companies might position their creative director as the star, Hermès puts design at the center. “It's about the designer, or the rapper,” Kowal said, perhaps mocking Louis Vuitton menswear designer Pharrell Williams. “There's a quirkiness to everything,” he said.
There's so much designer stuff in the mix these days — $2,000 straw market baskets, $3,000 cardigan jackets, and $1,500 ankle boots all on sale around the world at once — that buying luxury goods usually means choosing which logos you want to wear, which may be one reason the industry is sluggish.
But Hermès stands out in the eyes of its fans, too: Sales rose 17 percent in the first quarter of this year. Yes, it makes some of the world's most famous handbags, the Birkin and Kelly, and some consider shopping there akin to a 3D chess game to win an It bag, because how can you possibly like Hermès products unless you've bought a wide range of them? offered They can't pass up the chance to buy a handbag; there's an entire subreddit, “The Hermes Game,” where customers (er, clients) swap tips on how they got their hands on a coveted bag at a ferocious pace. For them, shopping is a full-contact sport. (“Amazing. Just spent over $10,000,” reads one recent Google review of a store on Washington, DC's Palmer Alley.) Hermes is so popular that two people in California filed a lawsuit against the company. Don't let me buy a BirkinImagine being so desperate to get your hands on that wallet that you have no choice but to sue.
Somehow, the name's banality doesn't make it any less valuable: “No one wants the perfect Kelly because they see a girl with an Hermes scarf tied around the handle of a cheap bag,” says Chris Black, co-host of the podcast How Long Gone and something of an anthropologist of cool. “Plus, we all love a horse girl.”
What's driving this craze? This year, the business podcast Acquired released a four-hour-plus episode on Hermès. Hosts Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal breathlessly extol the world of Hermès, including its “jobs” making porcelain, furniture, ties and saddles, its connections to Grace Kelly and Queen Elizabeth, and its delightful mythology. (They say that Hermès was founded in 1836 as a saddler a little over 100 years ago, and launched clothing almost a century later, because customers said they were tired of their horses being better dressed than they were.) They attribute Hermès's endurance and appeal to its quirkiness, its eccentricity. In the world's most self-conscious industry, Hermès dares to laugh.
When asked to describe Hermès' sense of humor, Van Heuer gave a typically French response: a tangible essence that's hard to put into words. “Witty,” she said. “Appropriate. A bit, oh, what can I say?” she fumbled for the French word. “There's a sense of magic or wonder.”
So to some extent, that may be true.
“With some characters [a] It’s a vulnerability that is expressed,” she said.
A Pepe Le Pew-like character? The show opened with a clip from A Tribe Called Quest's “Luck of Lucien,” a tribute to French rapper Lucien Revolucion, in which Lucien is trying to woo a woman: “That's a French accent! Look, I'm French, I'm from Paris. Don't you think that's sexy?”
It may sound chic, but what Van Het, who is celebrating her 10th anniversary at Hermès this year, realizes with her clothes, or more precisely with Hermès, is that individuality is the purest luxury. Wearing her clothes, you become a person, not a brand. And isn't that true in our world where everything seems more and more similar? Nearly every model wore the most impossibly ridiculous hat in the history of hats, sexy little police hats, and leather, the most luxurious and durable material in the world and of course the material of Hermès' most famous products, in a funky and eccentric way. It was as if a crazy French friend had told them that anything can become a belt: a scarf, a necklace, a quilted coat tied around their waist as a skirt. Right!
A locaval, the kind of blanket that is draped over a horse after a race, was fastened over the leather overalls, and a Kelly bag was worn around the waist as a bum bag (think of it like trying to pull a ticket off a horse). that At the theme park!
The person we saw on the runway was a queer woman, someone who lets her dreams, fears and new ideas take shape through her clothes, and who is less interested in looking perfect than in looking resolutely like herself, even if that means looking a little eccentric. She is the woman Vanhee presents in his collection, and Vanhee himself, who mixes the credible corporate status symbols with audacity and laughter. Quite risqué!
“Beauty is the basis of everything I do,” Van Hee said. “Whatever I do has to evoke beauty. And beauty to me is a feeling of warmth. It has to be a smile.”
One man, wearing a green scarf-patterned jacket unzipped to reveal a bit of his chest and a gold necklace, was more forthright about the appeal of Hermes: “It's the best quality.”