PARIS – Add Hermès to the record of luxurious manufacturers in search of a brand new inventive director.
The French home on Friday launched an announcement formally confirming the departure of its males’s inventive director Véronique Nichanian, with out naming a successor. It stated her closing assortment can be introduced on Jan. 24 throughout Paris Males’s Vogue Week.
In line with sources, an inside successor might be named. Amongst Nichanian’s longest-serving deputies is designer Benjamin Brett.
A spokeswoman for Hermès had confimed late on Thursday that Nichanian was stepping down, following the publication of the designer’s exit interview with French day by day Le Figaro. With a 37-year tenure, she was vogue’s longest-serving inventive director.
“We thank Véronique warmly for her eye, her imaginative and prescient, her generosity, her power and her curiosity. Propelled by her expertise, conviction and whimsy, she has guided the future of a person who walks with attract. The success of the lads’s universe owes a lot to her,” the model stated.
A graduate of the École de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, Nichanian started her profession at Cerruti, working beneath Nino Cerruti.
She was requested to affix Hermès in 1988 by its legendary chief government officer Jean-Louis Dumas, turning into one of many few ladies main a menswear division at a significant luxurious home. Throughout her tenure, the model has grown into an business behemoth, with revenues of 15.2 billion euros in 2024.
“Working for Hermès since 1988 has been an immense pleasure. I’m very proud to be a part of this huge household by which I’ve been capable of flourish and luxuriate in whole inventive freedom,” the 71-year-old designer stated within the assertion issued by Hermès.
“As somebody hooked up to work of the hand and attentive to the emotion of a garment, I’ve repeatedly sought to reinvent my strategy to the vêtement-objet by creating a recent wardrobe the place supplies are combined, strategies are mixed, and innovation and heritage are introduced collectively,” Nichanian added.
“My want has all the time been to create garments of in the present day for the long run. To me, there’s not an Hermès man; there are Hermès males,” she concluded.
Nichanian thanked the late Jean-Louis Dumas and present Hermès chief government officer Axel Dumas, his nephew, in addition to the model’s inventive director Pierre-Alexis Dumas, his son. “I additionally thank my studio, warmly, for all of those shared years, these shared adventures,” she stated.
She informed Le Figaro that she had been discussing handing over her duties with the 2 senior executives for the final couple of years.
“Hermès was gracious sufficient to let me select the second that felt proper to step away,” she informed the paper. “Now appears like the correct time to move the baton.”
Her spring 2026 was a condensé of her signature fashion, combining sensual textures – suppose leather-based openwork weave on shirts and trousers, tough edges on jaunty silk twill bandanas, and ribbed and nubby knits – with a breezy sense of luxurious.
“Inside males’s vogue, Véronique has contributed in a significant strategy to the creation of a recent fashion by way of her perpetual reinvention of clothes and its makes use of in addition to by way of her fixed analysis round supplies, know-how and colour,” Hermès stated.
“And if one feels so good in her garments, it’s as a result of all through all these years she has all the time taken honest, genuine pleasure in dressing males. She has given them a silhouette – an elegant, discreet and timeless magnificence – and invented private particulars for them, particulars she lovingly calls ‘egocentric,’” it added.
The announcement is the newest shakeup within the inventive director ranks at main European luxurious homes, together with Chanel, Dior and Balenciaga. Compared, Hermès has been a paragon of stability. Nadège Vanhee, its inventive director of girls’s ready-to-wear, has been within the put up since 2014.
Among the many main menswear designers presently with out a portfolio are Kim Jones, who stepped down as inventive director of males’s collections at Dior in January, and Hedi Slimane, who left his put up as inventive, inventive and picture director of Celine in October 2024.
The upheaval comes as manufacturers battle to reverse a slowdown in luxurious consumption worldwide, with aspirational customers turning their backs on high-ends items after a number of years of steep worth will increase within the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
Hermès has benefited from its safe-haven standing, because the rarity of its purses make them funding items whose worth usually will increase, fairly decreases, over time.
Its ready-to-wear and equipment division has additionally proved a stable earner, with gross sales rising 6 % within the first half, serving to the corporate outperform its sector friends. The division now accounts for 28 % of gross sales at Hermès.
– With contributions from Miles Socha
