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DESIGNER

Nadège Vanhée-Cybulski

Creative Director, Women's Ready-to-Wear, Hermès · Artistic Director (Womenswear), Hermès

French designer who has led Hermès womenswear since 2014 and will design the house's first haute couture collection in January 2027.

Born 1978
Birthplace Seclin, France
Nationality French

Nadège Vanhée-Cybulski has designed Hermès women’s ready-to-wear since 2014. Her clothes draw on the house’s saddlery and leather work without treating them as costume: bridle details, supple skins and riding shapes adapted for a modern wardrobe. In July 2026 Hermès also named her to design its first haute couture collection, scheduled to show in January 2027. (FashionUnited; PAUSE)

Her twelve years at Hermès have been marked by steady development rather than a sharp change of image. She returns to the meeting of leather and silk, severe cut and ease of movement, refining those combinations from season to season. She has compared the length of her appointment to successive French presidential terms; the working relationship has given her time to pursue an idea beyond one show. (W Magazine)

Seclin, Antwerp and an apprenticeship in restraint

Vanhée-Cybulski grew up near Lille in northern France. She studied at Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts before spending a further year at the Institut Français de la Mode in Paris. (Woolmark Prize)

Before Hermès, Vanhée-Cybulski worked at Maison Margiela, Céline under Phoebe Philo, and The Row in New York. Those studios taught different forms of restraint: Margiela’s questioning of a garment’s construction, Philo’s precision and The Row’s attention to fabric and fit. (Woolmark Prize; Modem; W Magazine)

It was in London, while working at Céline, that she met the art gallerist Peter Cybulski, whom she later married and whose surname she added to her own. The couple settled in the Pigalle district of Paris with their daughter, Enid, in an apartment that mixes his taste for warmth and hers for minimalism — a domestic version, by her own account, of the same push and pull she puts into her collections. (W Magazine)

A new hand in the Hermès workroom

Hermès announced in July 2014 that Christophe Lemaire was leaving the house's women's ready-to-wear studio after four years, and named Vanhée-Cybulski, then 36, as his successor within days. Her appointment ended an all-male run at the top of Hermès womenswear that had passed through Lemaire, Jean Paul Gaultier and Martin Margiela before him, making her the first woman to hold the post. Axel Dumas, Hermès' chief executive, said at the time that "her talent and her creative track record will be great assets in the continued development of women's ready-to-wear." (CNBC; The Glass Magazine)

Lemaire showed his final Hermès collection, for Spring 2015, on 1 October 2014; Vanhée-Cybulski's own first collection, for Autumn/Winter 2015, showed the following March. She chose an equestrian theme for her debut — bridle leather, jodhpur shapes, blanket checks — staying close to a house whose entire visual language originates in saddlery rather than announcing a personal signature over it. (Fashionista; Kinfolk)

In between, individual collections have taken sharper, more theatrical turns without breaking from the underlying vocabulary. For Spring/Summer 2023 she staged a "rave in the desert," sending pale tan leather shirting and tailored trousers into russet tones, perforated leather and silky dresses in orange and pink, on a stage built like a glowing sand dune — a nod to Burning Man rather than to Hermès's usual equestrian references. For Autumn/Winter 2024, models walked past curtains of falling rain in biker boots, studded leather jackets and boot-cut trousers, a "braving the elements" staging built around resilient leathers and robust twills. (Malay Mail, October 2022; Malay Mail, March 2024)

Duality as a working method

Vanhée-Cybulski describes her approach as working on opposites: "I work on opposites. I like this polarity of classic and a bit of twist or underground." In practice this means pairing the hardness of leather with the fluidity of silk, sportswear cut with couture-level finishing, and a body-conscious silhouette with clothes still engineered for everyday wear rather than spectacle. (W Magazine)

She has also described her relationship to the house's own archive, rather than to fashion history generally, as the real engine of each collection: "They're like Ali Baba's cave... with a layer of delicate imagination," she has said of the Hermès stockrooms, which hold decades of saddlery, scarves and leather samples she can reinterpret rather than quote directly. Casting has followed the same logic of variation on a theme: she has spoken of designing "different morphologies" into a single collection, comparing the process to a filmmaker building a cast of distinct characters rather than dressing one idealised body repeatedly. (Kinfolk)

That method has kept her Hermès identifiably continuous across more than a decade of collections without becoming static. Trousers, coats and knitwear have carried the weight of the house's identity more often than eveningwear, in keeping with a brief that is ready-to-wear rather than occasionwear; exotic and calf leathers, generally the province of the leather goods studio, recur in her clothing as jackets, trousers and even knitwear panels, a cross-category use of material that is distinctive to her tenure rather than to the house's saddlery lineage generally. (AnOther)

Her Autumn/Winter 2026 collection, shown in Paris on 7 March 2026, made that duality explicit. Titled around the French idiom entre chien et loup — literally "between dog and wolf", the hour of dusk when a shape on the horizon could be either — it set biker dresses that spiralled asymmetrically around the body, second-skin leather bodysuits and spliced, pinched tailoring against a palette of petroleum blue, merlot and a chartreuse verging on phosphorescent, with burnished leathers that shifted colour under light. Critics read it as a study in "revealing and concealing" simultaneously, rather than a collection built around two opposing aesthetics. (AnOther)

She has increasingly shown a second chapter of each collection away from Paris: the Autumn/Winter 2026 line reappeared on 4 June 2026 in Bel Air, Los Angeles, restyled with dancewear and athletic references for a more relaxed setting, in what press described as a study in restraint and craftsmanship over spectacle. (Culted)

A first for the house: Hermès enters haute couture

Hermès operates without a single creative director; leather goods, jewellery, perfume, menswear and womenswear each answer to their own designer, a structure Pierre-Alexis Dumas has overseen as the house's creative director since 1992. Within that structure, haute couture had never existed at all — Hermès has no history of made-to-measure runway collections shown under the official Paris couture calendar, unlike houses such as Chanel or Dior. In July 2026 the company confirmed it would join the spring/summer 2027 Haute Couture Week schedule, running from 25 to 28 January 2027, with Vanhée-Cybulski designing the debut collection. Dumas, asked why Hermès was entering couture after 190 years, said simply: "Why not?", citing the house's leather and textile expertise. The house has since expanded its studio, including hiring the designer Léa Peckre, previously design director of women's ready-to-wear at Céline. (FashionUnited; PAUSE)

The couture debut coincides with a separate, longer-planned change of guard elsewhere in the house: Véronique Nichanian showed her final Hermès menswear collection in January 2026 after 37 years, and Grace Wales Bonner, her successor, presents her own first menswear collection at the same January 2027 Paris season in which Vanhée-Cybulski shows her first couture line. Neither appointment altered Vanhée-Cybulski's own role, which remains confined to women's ready-to-wear and now also couture. (World Footwear)

As of September 2026, no couture pieces have been shown, and Vanhée-Cybulski continues to design Hermès women's ready-to-wear alongside preparing the debut. What the new line will be called, and how it will be labelled apart from the ready-to-wear, has not yet been announced.

Reading and dating the work

A Hermès womenswear garment is best placed by season rather than by any code on its label; the house does not print a designer's name on ready-to-wear. Vanhée-Cybulski's first collection was Autumn/Winter 2015, shown in March 2015. Earlier collections belong to Christophe Lemaire, Jean Paul Gaultier or Martin Margiela, whose Hermès womenswear ran from 1997 to 2003. (Fashionista; WWD)

Because every Hermès runway collection is extensively photographed and archived, matching a garment's cut, print and hardware against a specific season's show images is the most reliable way to date it in the absence of a code on the label itself. Once her debut haute couture collection is shown in January 2027, it will need to be read as a separate category altogether — a made-to-measure line shown at Paris Couture Week, distinct from the seasonal ready-to-wear she has designed since 2014. (FashionUnited)

References

Record
Born
May 30, 1978
Also known as
Nadège Vanhée
Education
Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Fashion design (2003)Institut Français de la Mode (2004)

Selected works

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