The Woman Behind the Hermès Man

For 36 years, Véronique Nichanian has supplied the exacting creative vision for the storied French house's menswear. Her secret: navigating the space between fashion and style.

- Paul Croughton

There are six large jars in Véronique Nichanian’s office, lined up in a row near her desk, where, during idle moments, she can look up and ponder their contents. They’re stuffed with brightly coloured bits of fabric—one has various shades of blue, another yellow, the next greens. They’re mood jars, of sorts. Nichanian is obsessed with textiles and colour, and these vessels, she says, have been with her for years. She pulls a clump of thread from one as if it’s a jewel, and in a sense, it is. If these are the palettes that excite her—a woman with immaculate taste, a fastidious eye and ranging curiosity, who has remained perched atop the menswear tree for nearly 4 decades at one of France’s finest luxury maisons—then they are special indeed.

Nichanian is artistic director of the Hermès men’s universe, a bombastic title with a somewhat prosaic explanation, which is that she designs all the menswear stuff: clothes, bags, shoes, accessories and the like. But it’s how she has done this that intrigues. She’s been dressing chic Parisian males and their counterparts around the globe for 36 years and is the longest-serving creative director in fashion who doesn’t have her name above the shop. Only the Ralphs and the Giorgios of the world have been designing in one place for longer.

But in a sense, Nichanian has also done what they’ve done. When she was appointed by Hermès to take over its menswear division back in 1988, the brand was in the midst of a reinvention by Jean-Louis Dumas, great-great-grandson of founder Thierry Hermès, and was not the pinnacle of aspiration that it is today. Nichanian didn’t lay the foundation at Hermès, but she can claim to have built the temple of its contemporary menswear business brick by brick, starting at a time before GPS, Pretty Woman and the World Wide Web.