Maker Of Fresh Melody

Her fashion is intense, her taste precise. Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski, the creative director of the women’s collections at Hermès, sketches the contours of free and independent women from across the world.

- Adrienne Ribes

She has a serious air about her. Or rather focused. But the moment she smiles, her face changes completely. Thick, Venetian blonde hair, some would call her hair red to make things simpler. A porcelain complexion, which simply blew away the makeup artist charged with doing her up for the photoshoot. “I had next to nothing on her skin to retouch,” she said.

Dressed in a navy blue lavaliere blouse, black trousers, sandals, the lady isn’t much of a wearer of jewellery. All she had on was her watch and wedding ring.

Nadège Vanhée-Cybulski has a beauty of a contemporary heroine, who is free, and simultaneously has something of the past in her, a sort of reincarnation of the Woman in the Mirror by Italian painter Titian. It was later, over the course of the conversation, that we were able to get a better understanding. Nadège was born in Seclin, a little town in north of France, which comes under the city of Lille in 1978 to a father from the North and an Algerian mother. “From the Kabylie?” we asked. “Constantine,” she specified. And then it made more sense.

The fact was that she has a beauty that is not defined by borders. In July of 2014, she was called by the house of Hermès to take over for Christophe Lemaire as artistic director for the women’s collections. Her surname, which is quite a mouthful, was not very well known by the public at the time.

A graduate of the Académie royale des BeauxArts d’Anvers and the Institut Français de la mode, she continued on a path without a single misstep: Delvaux, Maison Martin Margiela, Céline with Phoebe Philo, then The Row in New York with the Olsen twins. Not a single dull moment on that curriculum vitae, we say.