Hermès Spring 2026 Ready-to-Wear: The Wild South Reimagined

“America has the Wild West; France has the wild south.”

For Spring-Summer 2026, Hermès Creative Director Nadège Vanhee returned to the saddle, quite literally, to reinterpret the Maison’s equestrian heritage through the lens of freedom, sensuality, and craftsmanship. Staged at Paris’s Garde Républicaine, the historic home of France’s mounted military corps, Vanhee’s tenth-year collection for the house paid homage to the modern-day equestrienne: fearless, refined, and unshakeably independent.

After ten years at the helm, Vanhee understands the Hermès woman intimately: her desires, her rhythm, and her relationship with luxury. The Spring 2026 collection was a testament to that instinct, presenting heritage reframed with restraint and precision.

Across 57 looks, the designer presented an intelligent evolution of house codes: supple leather, saddle-inspired harnesses, and tailoring shaped for motion. The response was immediate. On social media, fashion devotees praised it as “the best runway thus far in Paris Fashion Week,” a rare alignment of critical and public acclaim for a collection that balanced sensuality and serenity in equal measure.

The show unfolded on a sand-covered runway, a poetic nod to the riding arenas of the Camargue, where white horses run wild between the Rhône and the Mediterranean. The terrain grounded each look, the models’ boots pressing softly into the sand, echoing hoofprints and discipline, nature and control.

Vanhee described her muse as “a woman of freedom, of letting go, of bohemianism, an equestrian spirit translated for the city.”

The opening look, a brown leather bodice harness layered beneath a long leather-and-canvas coat and paired with Bermuda-length riding shorts, established the collection’s tone: powerful, sensual, and protective. The harness, an object of both utility and intimacy, recurred throughout, sometimes over bandeaus, sometimes anchoring printed scarves across the chest.

Quilting, borrowed from the Camargue saddle, appeared on padded tops, silk twill jackets, and structured skirts, uniting the collection through tactile craftsmanship. “I wanted to have the language of the skin,” Vanhee said, and it showed in how each material seemed to embrace, rather than simply dress, the body.

Hermès’s colour story this season was distinctly southern French: sand, olive, sienna, and ochre, accented by pops of red, plum, and tangerine. These tones evoked both the warmth of the Camargue and the sun-baked textures of the region’s landscape.

While most associate Hermès with its bags, this collection firmly shifted attention to the clothing: sculptural, sensuous, and deeply wearable. Leather maxi skirts, utility trousers, and playsuits replaced the expected Birkin-centric spectacle, allowing Vanhee’s mastery of proportion and material to speak on its own terms.

If there was a single motif that anchored the show, it was the riding boot, seen in 55 of the 57 looks. Each pair reinterpreted the traditional equestrian form with architectural precision, featuring knee-high silhouettes, asymmetric collars with a Spanish topline, and sleek, minimal seams.

Rendered in shades from espresso black to olive green and white embossed leather, the boots conveyed power and protection, a modern kind of armour for the Hermès woman.

In a rare departure from the Maison’s most famous icon, Vanhee presented only two Birkins: one in tan suede, the other in a brown-and-white leather duo. The focus instead was on new silhouettes:

• A horseshoe-shaped shoulder bag carried by hand rather than on the shoulder, in tan, burgundy, and dark green.
• Sleek bucket bags in smooth and grained black leather, alongside oversized canvas-leather hybrids.
• A floral silk top-handle bag, a playful nod to the house’s silk heritage.
• Compact bowler-style bags in mustard, cherry red, and chocolate.

Each one demonstrated Hermès’s enduring commitment to function through form, practical yet sculptural and unmistakably sensual.

A reinterpretation of an 1980s Hermès scarf print became the collection’s most expressive pattern, appearing across tailored skirt sets, quilted bras, and outerwear. Beyond prints, the scarves themselves were styled in unorthodox ways: woven through necklaces, draped beneath harnesses, or looped through belt straps, redefining how an Hermès carré can move with the body.

At its core, Hermès Spring 2026 is a meditation on balance between control and freedom, intimacy and strength, the natural and the tailored. Vanhee’s woman does not ride to escape; she rides to arrive. Her uniform is not armour, but a second skin—supple, architectural, and alive.

Ten years in, Nadège Vanhee has given Hermès not just continuity, but clarity: a wardrobe where craftsmanship becomes instinct and heritage becomes desire.