Justin Leveritt/Hermès.
After presenting the first part of its Autumn/Winter 2026 womenswear collection in Paris, Hermès transported the story to Los Angeles, where Artistic Director Nadège Vanhée unveiled what she described as the collection’s “second chapter.” Staged in a hilltop pavilion in Bel Air that took a full month to build, as the California sun disappeared behind the horizon, the presentation felt like a continuation of an ongoing conversation about movement, femininity and freedom.
The setting, a structure framed by classical columns and grand scale, announced the show’s title in large letters: ‘Silhouettes on the Horizon.’ Washed in neon-lit pale yellow designed to dissolve into the golden-hour light of the surrounding hills, it was less a venue than a proposition: that what happens when the light changes, when the lines between fiction and reality soften, is exactly where Hermès wants to be right now. The front-row spectators formed a star-studded, multi-generational crowd that embodied the evening’s blend of Hollywood classicism and modern subculture. Miley Cyrus, Keke Palmer and Natasha Lyonne sat among the guests under the neon-lit pavilion.
Max Farago/Hermès.
Max Farago/Hermès.
Vanhée has been artistic director of women’s ready-to-wear at Hermès since 2014, and the Los Angeles presentation marked the third instalment of a travelling format she launched in New York in 2024 and continued in Shanghai in 2025. Unlike the resort collections most major houses deploy for their mid-season road shows, these are proper expansions of the main narrative, each city offering a new chapter rather than a change of subject. In Shanghai, there was a new frisson of eclecticism and play; in New York, she drew on the pace and energy of a city where she once worked, before Hermès, as design director at The Row. Los Angeles, she has said, is a place where you create yourself. The collection reflected that.
At the heart of the Bel Air presentation was an exploration of the dress through the Carré, Hermès’ signature silk scarf reimagined as fluid, body-conscious silhouettes that balanced movement and structure. The dress is not a category traditionally associated with Hermès, a house whose identity has long been anchored in leather and its extraordinary silk heritage, and Vanhée has been open about that being precisely why she wanted to centre it. The house’s savoir-faire is being extended into flou, the French dressmaking term for the kind of fluid, body-grazing construction that requires a completely different discipline from tailoring or leatherwork, and the results suggest she has found her footing there.
The ballet was the animating reference throughout. Jewel-toned satin dresses arrived in rouge tango, vert impérial and jaune flave, their palette somewhere between old Hollywood and a vintage Cadillac convertible, their construction informed by the ballet slipper, fine piping tracing the body’s line while grosgrain ribbons fastened and unfastened at the bust. Cache-coeur knits wrapped and supported the form with the practical warmth of a dancer’s wrap top, integrated directly into dresses rather than worn over them. Smocked knit jumpsuits with flared legs and glittering embroidery offered an elevated take on warm-up attire, the kind of thing that reads simultaneously as rehearsal and performance.
Max Farago/Hermès.
Max Farago/Hermès.
Vanhée repeatedly returned to the image of a dancer off-duty. That image held through the more overtly Californian moments: sensual foulard dresses in luminous silk velvet worn under biker jackets and paired with leather coats, the dancer suddenly on the Pacific Coast Highway, movement going wherever it wants to go.
The Soleil de Soie Tattoo carré, one of the house’s iconic scarf designs, was reimagined in three dimensions: smocked, gathered and draped as though lifted from its centre and allowed to fall into cascading folds. The evening looks that closed the show drew on different territory entirely, draped embroidered gowns glittering against black satin and deep velvet, the California light now gone and the sky above Bel Air doing what it does best.
The accessories department naturally matched the garments’ perpetual motion, delivering an array of covetable leather engineering. The runway prioritised buttery yellow leather top-handle bags, micro-clutches carried in-hand like dance accessories, and minimal shoulder bags with highly flexible straps that moved fluidly alongside the models’ gait. Classic multi-tone Birkin models and modified, stud-lined variations shared the stage with sleek evening envelopes that added a modern crunch to the velvet and satin gowns.
Max Farago/Hermès.
Max Farago/Hermès.
What made the collection particularly compelling was that tension between softness and strength, between flowy dresses and leather coats. Rather than presenting femininity as something fragile, Vanhée continues to frame it as something dynamic and self-assured.
Discover the Autumn/Winter 2026 collection here.
photography. courtesy of Justin Leveritt, Max Farago
words. Gennaro Costanzo
