The fitting room at 24 Faubourg Saint-Honoré runs narrow

The fitting room at 24 Faubourg Saint-Honoré runs narrow. There is space for a mirror, a stool, and two people standing close enough to discuss the fall of a sleeve. In 1967, Catherine de Karolyi stood in that room adjusting the armhole on a silk blouse while the woman wearing it — a regular client, name unrecorded — complained that ready-to-wear could never match bespoke. De Karolyi said nothing. She pinned the seam tighter and sent the blouse downstairs.

Hermès has never employed a creative director in the LVMH sense. It has had designers, certainly, but the house moves by accretion rather than revolution. Three women, across three distinct eras, shaped what that means. None of them sought to redefine the brand. They understood that Hermès already knew what it was.

Catherine de Karolyi and the invention of women's ready-to-wear

De Karolyi arrived at Hermès in 1961, hired to establish a women's ready-to-wear line that did not yet exist. The house made saddles, scarves, and bags. It sold a few tailored pieces through special order, but there was no collection in the way Chanel or Dior understood the term. De Karolyi had trained at the Chambre Syndicale and worked under Balenciaga, where she learned that a garment's interior mattered as much as its silhouette. She brought that rigour to Hermès and applied it to clothes that were not, strictly speaking, fashion.

Her first collection appeared in 1967. It included shirtdresses in printed silk, trench coats with leather detailing, and knit separates that moved like jersey but held their shape like woven cloth. The pieces did not photograph dramatically. They worked when worn, which was the point. De Karolyi believed that a woman should be able to dress in under ten minutes and remain comfortable until evening. She cut trousers with a high waist and a straight leg, jackets with a soft shoulder and no padding, blouses that did not gape between the third and fourth button.

She stayed for twenty years. By the time she left in 1980, Hermès had a women's wardrobe that felt neither derivative nor overly precious. It was not minimalism — there were prints, textures, colour — but it was spare in the sense that nothing extra remained. De Karolyi did not give interviews. She did not take a bow at the end of the show. She preferred, she said once to a colleague, to let the clothes speak, though she knew perfectly well that clothes do not speak. They simply fit or they don't.

Marithé and François Girbaud's interlude and the arrival of Martin Margiela

Hermès spent the 1980s in a state of polite confusion. The house tried several designers, none of whom lasted. It was not a question of talent. Hermès operates on a time scale that does not suit most creative egos. Samples take months. The atelier will reject a sleeve if the lining pulls. The family — still in control, still majority shareholders — moves slowly and listens carefully, which can feel like resistance if you are used to faster approval.

Martin Margiela arrived in 1997. He had spent the previous decade deconstructing fashion at his own label, turning linings outward and seams into focal points. Hermès seemed, on paper, an odd fit. But Jean-Louis Dumas, then managing the house, understood that Margiela's interest in construction aligned with the maison's own obsession with how things were made. The appointment was not about disruption. It was about clarity.

Margiela's first collection for Hermès appeared in March 1998. It was not a Margiela collection. The proportions were wearable, the palette restrained, the materials exactly what you would expect: calfskin, cashmere, silk twill. But the construction was different. Margiela cut jackets with the sleeve set slightly forward, trousers with a flat front and no waistband, coats that wrapped and tied rather than buttoned. He used the house's leather workshops to produce garments that were technically bags — structured, panelled, finished on both sides. A jacket became a soft luggage piece. A skirt moved like a Kelly bag turned inside out.

He worked without a studio in the traditional sense. He came to Paris for fittings, sent sketches from Antwerp, and communicated primarily with the atelier. The press called him reclusive. He was simply uninterested in the performance of being a designer. His collections for Hermès were shown on models who walked quickly and did not pose. The clothes looked like clothes, which was a radical position in 1999.

Margiela left in 2003. The house did not announce his departure for several months. By then, the template was set. Hermès had learned that a designer could be conceptual without being loud, that innovation could mean a sleeve rather than a manifesto.

Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski and the long game

Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski took over women's ready-to-wear in 2014, appointed from within after working in Hermès's leather studio. She had trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and worked under Margiela at both his own label and at Hermès, which made her fluent in the house's vocabulary before she was asked to expand it.

Her first collection was almost invisible. It refined what was already there: trousers with a slightly higher rise, coats with a cleaner shoulder, knits that sat closer to the body without clinging. The palette was sand, navy, grey, and a particular shade of brown that Hermès calls gold. The pieces worked in the same way De Karolyi's had forty years earlier — they solved problems rather than announced themselves.

Vanhee-Cybulski has now been at Hermès for a decade, longer than Margiela, nearly as long as De Karolyi. Her collections have become more confident without becoming more insistent. She uses the house's leather atelier to produce garments that blur the line between apparel and object: a coat with a bag's structure, a dress with a saddle's stitching. She has introduced younger silhouettes — shorter hemlines, wider trousers, cropped jackets — but they arrive gradually, season by season, so that the shift feels like evolution rather than trend.

She does not court the press in the way other designers do. She gives brief interviews, usually to Vogue or System, and speaks primarily about craft. In a 2022 conversation with System, she said that her job was not to invent but to interpret, which undersells what she does. Interpretation at this level is a form of invention. It simply happens more slowly.

Hermès is now the second-largest luxury house by market capitalisation, behind LVMH. It has achieved this without a celebrity creative director, without a logo-driven product strategy, and without the kind of hype cycles that define its competitors. Three women, across sixty years, built the wardrobe that makes that possible. They did not seek attention. They cut a better sleeve.