On the designers who preceded her at Hermès:
Jean Paul Gaultier had a lot of freedom at the house. He was really experimental, he tried to expand the scope of the silhouette while still playing with ideas like fetishism. Martin Margiela before Gaultier was a sort of chiropractor or osteopath. The house had gone in every direction and he really helped to consolidate the fundamentals. And with Christophe Lemaire [her immediate predecessor], I didn’t want to look too much. Lemaire, Gaultier, and Margiela—they really brought their brand to the house and I really wanted to be more like a searcher. For me it was easier to go back to the first silhouettes that were designed in the ’20s and ’30s, and the work of Lola Prusac and Catherine de Karolyi. I naturally looked more toward the women who designed for Hermès. When you flick through the archives, lots of women have given a strong imprint to the house, even though the first clothes designed for women were men’s adaptations.
On being a woman designer:
Gender is tricky. When you’re a writer, you can write a female character if you’re male. I always get annoyed when we have to justify. It was Rebecca Solnit [the author of Men Explain Things to Me] who said that too: why do we have to justify anything? Yes, equality is great, but it doesn’t make me a better designer because I’m female. I do see this conversation about women designers happening. But women voting was like what 80 years ago [in France]. I mean, women having bank accounts in France only happened in the ’70s. What I see in fashion is just a reflection of that. There is a lot more to do.
On function over form:
The house is really about transmission. You acquire something and know you’re going to wear it and know you’re going to transmit to your children. There’s also this idea of anchor. People feel this is a stable object. I see lots of models, and they walk in with a vintage shirt from Hermès, and they say, ‘oh, I bought it in a vintage store,’ or ‘I got that scarf from my mom’ and they recontextualize it. There’s this Hermès motto: designing objects that really help the user everyday, this concept of being functional. And I think when you think about functionality, you’re always relevant.