Everything, Everywhere, All At Once

For the first time, Hermes has installed a creative director of fashion accessories within its house, a single role that oversees four of its existing ateliers: gloves, belts, hats and fashion jewellery. The woman who has taken up the mantle: Clemande Burgevin Blachman, a design guru who has spent most of her career behind the scenes and has lent her modernist eye to everything from bags to advertising and, most notably, furniture and interiors. In an exclusive interview with Female – her first with a publication from Asia – she tells Noelle Loh that what makes a great fashion accessory is a free mind

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The house of Hermes never shouts, preferring instead to let its work and actions speak for themselves. This applies even when it makes a major move such as introducing a new creative director of fashion accessories.

Having previously never existed, the role is meant to bring a single cohesive and cross‑sectoral creative vision to the brand’s gloves, belts, hats and fashion jewellery studios. Think of these as the outer planets in Hermes’s solar system of 16 ateliers, helping to complete every ready‑to‑wear collection and no doubt contributing to the brand’s stellar growth (according to Reuters, overall sales increased by 22.9 per cent in the last quarter of 2022.)

Still, barely a word went out when the appointment happened in February last year - no press release, no fanfare. (The trade journal Women's Wear Daily was the only publication to directly report on it after learning about the news.) Not even when the person in the position possesses the cred and freshness many other fashion labels would gladly go to town with today: Clemande Burgevin Blachman.

Born in Paris to art-loving antique dealers, the 46-year-old is something of an industry insider's secret with deep connections to fashion's intellectual cool club. Following a PhD in literature at the Sorbonne and a stint in publishing, she employed her fine eye professionally - first to her own brand of bags and then at the illustrious ad agency BETC, where she was involved in the redesign of the identity of Paris's Museum of Decorative Arts.