## The Man Who Didn't Want the Job

The Man Who Didn't Want the Job

Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski stands in the sixth-floor studio at 24 Faubourg Saint-Honoré with her arms crossed, watching a model turn in a coat. The sleeves are too short. Not by much—half a centimetre, perhaps—but enough that the line breaks at the wrong point when the arm swings forward. She doesn't say anything. The première d'atelier already knows.

This is how most fittings go at Hermès. Vanhee-Cybulski, who has been artistic director of women's ready-to-wear since 2014, works in gestures as much as words. A tilt of the head. A hand tracing an invisible seam. The ateliers have been here longer than she has—some of them longer than she's been alive—and the house has a way of absorbing people who understand that craft is a conversation, not a monologue.

She didn't grow up wanting to design for Hermès. She didn't grow up wanting to design at all.

The Accidental Designer

Vanhee-Cybulski was born in 1978 in Roubaix, a northern French textile town that had already seen its mills close by the time she was in school. Her father worked in industry. Her mother sewed at home, but not for fashion—functional work, repairs, the kind of making that kept a household running. There was no romance in it.

She studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, entering in 1996 when the so-called Antwerp Six were still a recent memory and the school's reputation for rigour was at its peak. Antwerp doesn't teach you to sketch pretty dresses. It teaches you to think about the body as a problem to solve, cloth as a material with its own logic. Vanhee-Cybulski has said, in various interviews, that she found the process difficult. She wasn't a natural draper. She had to learn by repetition, by failing, by making the same sleeve twenty times until it worked.

After graduation, she worked for Maison Martin Margiela—first as an intern, then as a junior designer. Margiela, at the time, was still anonymous, still operating under a collective model that suited Vanhee-Cybulski's temperament. She stayed for seven years. When she speaks about that period, she talks about the studio more than the runway. The process of deconstructing a trench coat. The way a seam could be left raw or turned inside out to change the garment's entire attitude. Margiela taught her that luxury didn't require decoration. It required precision.

In 2005, she moved to Céline under Ivana Omazic, then to The Row in New York, working directly with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. The Row was, in many ways, a continuation of the Margiela philosophy—quiet, expensive, obsessed with the perfect shoulder. She spent four years there, learning how American women dressed when they had money and didn't need to prove it.

The Call

When Hermès approached her in 2014, she said no.

Not because she didn't respect the house. She did. But she had just returned to Europe, had two young children, and wasn't looking to take on a role that would require her to produce six collections a year and represent a brand with two centuries of history. She suggested they speak to someone else.

They didn't. Hermès doesn't move quickly, but when it moves, it's deliberate. The house had been without a women's ready-to-wear director since Christophe Lemaire's departure, and it wanted someone who understood craft, who wouldn't try to reinvent the house every season, who could work with the ateliers rather than against them.

Vanhee-Cybulski eventually agreed, on the condition that she could work the way she'd always worked—quietly, incrementally, without the noise that surrounds most contemporary fashion.

The Hermès Equation

Her first collection for Hermès, shown in March 2015, was not a revolution. It was a coat in double-face cashmere, a pair of trousers with a clean front and a soft waistband, a shirt in poplin that didn't gape at the bust. The pieces were expensive—Hermès prices start high and climb from there—but they were also wearable in a way that much of the house's previous ready-to-wear hadn't been.

Hermès is not, fundamentally, a fashion house. It is a leather goods and saddlery atelier that happens to make clothes. The ready-to-wear exists to support the bags, the scarves, the belts—the objects that generate the real revenue. Vanhee-Cybulski's job is not to make headlines. It's to make clothes that a woman might actually wear when she's carrying a Birkin.

This requires a particular kind of restraint. Hermès shows on the Paris calendar, but it doesn't operate on the same logic as the other houses. There are no viral moments, no celebrity front rows, no collaborations with streetwear brands. Vanhee-Cybulski designs for a customer who already knows what Hermès is and doesn't need to be convinced.

Her signature, if it can be called that, is the absence of signature. The coats have a soft shoulder and a long line. The trousers sit at the natural waist and fall straight. The dresses are cut on the bias or left simple, depending on the fabric. She works with the house's leather ateliers to develop bags that function as part of the collection rather than as separate accessories. A top-handle tote in Barenia calfskin. A shoulder bag with a single strap and no hardware.

The clothes don't photograph particularly well. They need to be worn, moved in, lived with. This is intentional.

What Doesn't Change

Hermès operates on a different clock than the rest of the industry. The house still owns its ateliers, still trains its craftsmen in-house, still sources most of its leather from tanneries it controls. Vanhee-Cybulski works within that system, not around it. She can't design a coat and have it in stores six weeks later. The process takes months. Patterns are developed, toiles are made, fittings are held, adjustments are noted. The ateliers have the final say on what's feasible.

This is both a limitation and a freedom. She doesn't have to chase trends. She doesn't have to respond to what happened on Instagram last week. She can design a trench coat that takes two seasons to perfect and know that it will still be relevant when it finally arrives in the boutique.

Her collections have become more confident over the past decade, but they haven't become louder. The spring 2025 show featured a series of coats in lightweight wool, cut long and left unlined. The autumn 2024 collection included a leather blouson with raglan sleeves and a drawstring waist—a piece that referenced the house's equestrian roots without costume. There were no obvious statements, no pieces designed to be pulled for editorial.

The Next Chapter

Vanhee-Cybulski is now in her eleventh year at Hermès, longer than she's stayed anywhere else. She still works in the same studio, still does her own fittings, still prefers to let the ateliers lead when it comes to construction.

The fashion industry has changed considerably since 2014. The runway system is under pressure. Customers are buying differently. Sustainability, transparency, and craft have moved from niche concerns to mainstream talking points. Hermès, in this context, looks less like an outlier and more like a model—proof that a house can operate slowly, pay its workers properly, and still turn a profit.

Vanhee-Cybulski doesn't talk much about legacy or influence. She talks about the next fitting, the next fabric, the next problem to solve. There is, she has said, always a better version of the coat. You just have to keep making it.