Nadège Vanhée is a punk. She’s also the artistic director of women’s ready-to-wear at heritage French luxury house Hermès. On the surface, punk and Hermès seem irreconcilable. But they’re less unlikely bedfellows than you might think.

Growing up in Northern France, Vanhée listened to The Velvet Underground on repeat. She was equally enamored of their music and their aesthetic. “I was always really attracted to this very minimal punk, New York style,” she says. When she was older, she’d go to shows by garage bands like The Detroit Cobras. Much to the relief of her press attaché from Hermès, where she’s celebrating her 10th year, Vanhée declines to discuss even her more benign punk escapades on the record. However, she does admit to dancing until 2:45 am after debuting part two of her Fall 2024 collection in New York in June. “The other good punk shit that I do is I always show up after a good night,” says Vanhée. Case in point, she was early to our 11 am interview the morning following the show—and its raucous afterparty.

With six-figure Birkin bags, leather coats that cost more than most mortgage payments, and a nearly 190-year legacy that began with horse harnesses and saddles, Hermès is often associated with Park Avenue doyennes, old-money Europeans, and airbrushed celebrities eager to flaunt their newly minted millions.

And sure. Those types buy Hermès. But it also appeals to acolytes after something more genuine and against the grain. Compared with so many luxury brands that feign badassery via pseudo-provocative campaigns, streetwear-inspired product drops, dimly lit runway shows in deep Brooklyn, and ambassadors with manufactured “edge,” Hermès is among the most credibly punk. There’s no trend-chasing. No changing its signature aesthetic and logo every three years. No revolving door of hot-young-thing designers. No pandering to celebrities to keep its name circulating. Hermès refuses to participate in the big-brand rat race, which is about the punk-est thing a luxury label can do. So Vanhée is not a surprising choice, but a natural fit: “Hermès has this very strong notion of being authentic. There is no bullshit.”

“It’s important to trigger emotion in fashion. We need that.”

Vanhée joins a tradition of sartorial agitators who have shaped the brand’s ready-to-wear offering. Jean Paul Gaultier, the eminently cheeky French designer responsible for Madonna’s cone bra, who is often referred to as fashion’s enfant terrible, helmed Hermès’s womenswear range from 2003 to 2010. And before that, the famously elusive Belgian designer Martin Margiela—who, for his eponymous line, fashioned iconic garments out of leather gloves and seat belts—held the reins from 1997 to 2003.

Just like Margiela, Vanhée studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. And she ended up working for that unorthodox Belgian designer who, she recalls, taught her how to inject a punk spirit into fashion design. “Margiela was a very punk house. Everything was done on his terms. And we were always looking to underground culture.” Though Vanhée asserts that she and Margiela are quite different, working with him in her 20s shaped her, she says. “Those years were instrumental.”

Vanhée’s punk proposition has evolved significantly over the last decade. Take her first collection for Fall 2015: There were bursts of blood-red silk and restrained uses of black leather for appropriate pieces like pants, as well as an utterly Vanhée-ian pair of overalls. However, an eggshell satin A-line dress, outerwear reminiscent of Pendleton blankets, and restrained suiting were ultimately the focus. It was perfectly lovely, but there was only a whisper of the confident designer who steers the house today. This Vanhée—the one with a decade of Hermès experience—experiments with cutouts, sends out all-leather-everything, mixes a whole troop of textures, and fearlessly deploys color, even the notoriously tricky canary yellow, which she showed for Fall.

“We are proposing a very pertinent attitude for today,” says Vanhée. “We’re a timeless, heritage house, but we’re anchoring ourselves in a relevant discourse rooted in authenticity, a bit of fun, a bit of coolness, and smartness.” Not one to sound her own horn, she reluctantly adds,“I think I bring a new angle and a new light.”

Indeed, Vanhée’s anarchic approach differs from that of her rabble-rousing predecessors. Margiela’s Hermès focused on lavishly languid clothes that were exquisite in their simplicity. Gaultier, meanwhile, flaunted his flair for the dramatic, presenting dominatrix-esque corsets, jodhpurs, whips, and catsuits. Vanhée falls somewhere in between. She combines alluringly assertive silhouettes and hyper-luxe leathers with more comforting shapes and fabrications. “It’s the idea of a strong woman,” says Vanhée of her Hermès. And while she’s the first woman to lead the house’s womenswear line in over 25 years, she doesn’t credit her gender with setting her apart. In fact, she believes that too much emphasis is often placed on a designer’s gender today. “You can paint a beautiful female body and be a male. What’s the matter? The best example is a writer. Think about Stephen King. He gets inside the head of a female psychopath, and that’s so cool,” she explains. “Today’s generation, they really don’t care. And you have so many types of men and women. Take Azzedine Alaïa. He had this perfect polarity of being a man and also having a very strong feminine side. So this is really not an issue for me.” She suggests that, rather than focusing on the highly visible aspect of lead designers, the industry would do well to seek greater gender parity on the business side.

Gender aside, Vanhée has demonstrated an innate understanding of what the new generation of Hermès clients desires. Specifically? Leather. In part one of her Fall 2024 collection, which was shown in Paris under an indoor rainstorm, she presented Une Bikeuse Équestre, a strong, subversive, largely leather lineup that combined the house’s equestrian codes with a Hells Angels twist. Think a studded black leather top tucked into buttery black leather pants, biker jackets galore, chocolate moto boots teamed with a tan hunt coat, and a red leather gilet with matching cropped trousers.

Part two of Hermès’s Fall collection took a Fifth Avenue-meets-St. Marks-meets-Saint-Honoré approach to this ride-or-die sensibility. In Lower Manhattan, models took to a concrete runway in taxicab-yellow jackets, silk blouses boasting a leather-strap print that vaguely recalled the New York City grid, jaunty leather caps, and, of course, top-to-toe black-leather looks. What could be more New York-slash-Paris than that? Classic Kelly bags hung from belts, freeing hands to hail a cab or swipe a subway card, and one model marched in an Hermès-orange leather flight suit that cleverly matched the hue of the traffic lights that hung from the ceiling.

“New York is a nest for creative people,” says Vanhée, who lived in Manhattan during her tenure as design director of The Row from 2011 until 2014. “It was a city that gave me an amazing experience that I would have never had in Europe.” One such experience:Seeking out fishnet stockings from East Village punk mainstay Trash and Vaudeville during work trips when she was at Margiela.

“What appeals to me about punk is the adrenaline. It’s visceral,” Vanhée describes. She aims to bring similar fervor to her Hermès presentations. Particularly at the Fall show in Paris, it was hard not to feel something—a swell of pride, a chill of excitement—while watching Vanhée’s army of leather-clad women march stoically through the rain (even if it was a man-made shower). “It’s really important to trigger emotion in fashion,” she says. “We need that.”