PARIS — Véronique Nichanian is 71, but gives off the impression that she’s decades younger. Her simmering energy is palpable. When I ask her how she feels about aging, she casts her glasses to the ground in a gesture of mock-disgust. “I’m going to have an operation for my eyes, because I hate wearing these.”
With Karl Lagerfeld’s death, her 38-year tenure at Hermès makes her the longest-serving creative director in Paris. “I remember after 10 years I said, ‘Oh mon Dieu, 10 years!’ And then it was 20 years and [then-CEO] Jean-Louis Dumas wrote me a letter, and I said, 20 years! Don’t talk about it! And then it was 25, and 30, and it was okay. I was happy. After a time, you decide that it’s not a problem anymore.” But, like everyone else of a certain age, she finds the years are slipping away fast. And now it’s time to go.
“Absolutely, for sure.” Nichanian agrees her work kept her young. “Every six months doing something new and working with people who are 30 years old, I feel exactly the same life. But I’m a very curious person. Since I was a child, I always wanted to run everywhere, see everything. I like to meet people. I like reading, but I’m not going to sit at home. I like traveling, being in the air because you’re calm for 10 hours. Getting old is a new side of life, but nobody at Hermès said, okay, you have to stop. I decided by myself. I used to say to Sophie [Seibel-Traonouïl, communications director], do you think I’m too old to do it again? But that was just in my head.”
There were other signals. Nichanian was from a time when research for a new collection might involve a trip to the library or some other bookish facility. Now it’s all about screens. “I want to stop that because it’s not interesting anymore, the way it’s going faster and faster. Last time, my team showed me something: ‘Do you see that? It’s so nice’. And I said, ‘Yes, I did that at Cerruti in 1988.’ So I think, okay, it’s time to stop when they’re bringing me my old things.”
She isn’t stopping entirely. Nichanian helped shape the totality of Hermès’ men’s product “universe,” which today generates billions of euros a year in sales, and she will continue to work on the maroquinerie and scarves as a consultant. It’s the ready-to-wear she is stepping away from completely. “That’s the big part because it’s really demanding with all this acceleration and I don’t want that. I said to everybody that after these beautiful years in fashion, I don’t want to start running everywhere.” So now, if she is in Japan or South Africa, or somewhere else she feels a deep affection for, she’ll be able to stay months, rather than weeks.
Her place will be taken by Grace Wales Bonner. They’ve not met but she is very happy about the decision. “Grace is a young woman who only designs for men. She will write a new page of the book.” And as both a woman and a young Black designer, Wales Bonner is as much a rara avis as Nichanian was when she started at Hermès nearly four decades ago.
Her father was an Armenian immigrant who built a successful cake company in Paris. I’m imagining a childhood spent around delicious baking smells and flights of decorative artisanal fancy that might mould an impressionable young mind. Unfortunately, his business was industrial. It supplied institutions. “But it was very nice too, because when he had to test something new, it was on me and my brother.” Where Nichanian’s father did exert some influence over subsequent developments was in his stylishness. “My father loved beautiful things,” she remembers. “We drank from crystal glasses. He wasn’t a dandy but he was elegant, very chic in a simple, discreet way. He had his own tailor, and shirts, shoes, everything was handmade. It was a very good lesson for me to have a few things, but make sure they were the best, the most beautiful. Plein de détails. He never put perfume on his skin, it was always going on his handkerchief.” When she cleared out the family home, Nichanian found her grandmother’s scarves from the 1940s. Hermès, of course.
She has vivid memories of 1968, the year when Paris took to the barricades. “My school went on strike. I was 14 years old, going on strike!” She laughs at the thought. After her brother marched down Boulevard Saint-Michel in a student demonstration, Nichanian’s father went crazy and whisked his kids off to the country. But she insists she was never a teen rebel. She wasn’t the kind of girl who had teen heartthrobs stuck on her wall, which perhaps made her a good fit for the unconventional way Hermès works with celebrities. “I’m not a groupie person. I would call someone and say I love what you do, I would love to dress you. It’s a feeling like that. We don’t pay anybody. And we become very good friends.” Still, the teenage Véronique loved being different. “I was very exact in my mind how I wanted to dress. It was a nightmare for my mum. I remember I was scared because I wanted to have sneakers and nobody wore sneakers with the white sole at that time. We went to a store in Paris that sold things for yachting, and I found my shoes. So I was wearing them at the lycée and everybody was looking at me.” And then Mick Jagger married Bianca Jagger in Saint-Tropez in a three-piece Tommy Nutter suit and a pair of worn sneakers. She was vindicated!
But when Nichanian enrolled at L’École de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne in the early 70s, “Nobody was talking about ready-to-wear, nobody was talking about men’s fashion. Did that exist?” The school’s focus was haute couture. Which means there was something quite remarkable about Italian menswear giant Nino Cerruti calling up and asking to see L’École’s best students in his search for an assistant. Five candidates were submitted, Nichanian the only girl. Cerruti said, “I love your dossier, design something for men and come and see me on Monday.” She spent the weekend working on ten drawings, thin, long-legged like the looks she would design for women. When she showed up on Monday, Cerruti said, “Okay, let’s go.” She didn’t believe him.
She was 19, and the whole situation was so unexpected that she saw herself working for Cerruti for a couple of years and then returning to the serious business of womenswear. Giorgio Armani was a Cerruti alum, but he’d got his start supervising fabrics whereas she worked directly on design with Nino. “It was a great time for Italian fashion and he started bringing me to the factories in Biella and Milan. I was living one week in Milan, one week in Paris. Designing clothes was my dream since I was 13, so it was all wonderful. And after two years, he asked if I was interested in going to Japan to follow the Japanese licensee.” Nichanian instantly said yes. It was tough at first because her translator was 20 years her senior and every time she had an appointment, everyone in the room would automatically defer to him. “But I was determined, I knew what I was talking about.”
She describes herself as having been “tiny, shy and discreet” at the time, so big, strong Nino naturally got all the kudos, but he treated her as an equal. Her first ever Cerruti show was in Stockholm. “I was trying to get all the boys in line, and I told Nino nobody was listening to me because I was tiny, and he yelled, ‘ Okay, guys, you see this little girl, you are going to listen to her because she knows what to do.’ It was very tough working with him, because you had to learn and understand very quickly. He wouldn’t tell you twice. I remember once he showed me something, and said, ‘What do you think about that?’ And I said I didn’t like it so much. And he said, ‘Oh, that’s a woman’s taste.’ And I said okay you know, I’m a woman, so if you didn’t take me because I’m a woman, we have a problem. And I think he loved that I wasn’t a…” When I suggest “yes-man,” she corrects me instantly. “No, yes-woman.”
And then, in 1988, Jean-Louis Dumas, the magus of Hermès, who transformed the company into a global luxury powerhouse, came calling. One July, Nichanian was packing for her summer holiday when the phone rang. “Bonjour, je suis Jean-Louis Dumas.” She laughed. “No, no, really it’s me and I would like to meet you.” She said it was impossible, she was leaving on holiday, she wasn’t interested at all. “Okay, let’s have breakfast in September,” he said. When September rolled around, Nichanian thought they would never hire her, but she duly showed up for her appointment clutching her croissant. Dumas greeted her with a beautiful breakfast in the beautifully bijou garden on the roof of the Hermès flagship on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. “I said I loved working with Mr. Cerruti and I wasn’t interested, but I found this man to be so clever, the way he was talking about Hermès, the way he wanted to transform the house, what he wanted to do for the world… I was coming to say no, but when I left, I felt I wanted to work for this man.” When Nichanian and Dumas met up two weeks later, he said, “I give you men’s and you do that like your petite entreprise.”
Dumas offered to call Cerruti and ask him to release her “like one father talking to another,” recalls Nichanian. She assured him that wouldn’t be necessary. “I went to see Nino and I told him I was very happy but I was going to Hermès, and he said ‘I’m very proud of you.’” On some deep level, Nichanian considers Cerruti her fairy godfather. “He brought me to men’s fashion. Once, much later, I told him, ‘You know what, Nino, I took all your bad side.’ He said, ‘You’re not doing bad with my bad side.’ When I saw the way I worked with my team, I recognized Nino. When he said, ‘We do it again, because it’s not nice,’ I was doing the same thing. He opened up the world. But Jean-Louis gave me everything and said do what you want. Before, Nino was the one who to okay l’hommage et le critique. Jean-Louis gave me the front row, the responsibility, and I said, okay, I want to be the best of the best, and I’ll work very hard.”
Before Nichanian arrived, there wasn’t much of a men’s offer at Hermès: ties, bags and a tiny menswear collection designed by Bernard Sanz. And she was coming from the huge worldwide business of Cerruti. “But everything was here,” she recalls. “And Hermès men’s was obvious for me. I said to Jean-Louis, I’m going to write down for you what I want to do. And the things I wrote are exactly what I’m doing 38 years later.”
Her farewell show highlights this extraordinary continuity. “I’ve taken clothes from old collections, because I want people to understand these are things you can keep for a long time. Vêtements d’aujourd-hui and pour longtemps. They never get old. I love that you can repair them, because that is luxury for me. My parents were like that. We don’t throw something away after six months. J’aime le temps long, and the values that come with that. I keep my friends for a long time. When I love my jacket, I want to keep it for a long time. It doesn’t only have a price, it has a meaning.”
Top of the list Nichanian made for Dumas was the concept of vêtements objets, clothes to fit in with the bags, the scarves, the towels and napkins and accessories that filled the house of Hermès. She told Dumas she wasn’t interested in creating total looks, which was the trend of the late 80s. “I wanted to make the clothes as an object. The man could be young, tall, fat, small, I didn’t care. I just wanted him to fall in love with this sweater, this jacket, these leather things, to take what worked for him. Because Hermès is a maison de geste, a gestural house of craft, of quality and proportion, the essence of the best, where we perfectly mix and match. Yes, we have to make a show, and everything has to fit together, but I did not want to propose it as outfits. You put this sweater with that leather coat and it was a way to present to the press. But what I liked was that one man took the sweater and another man took the coat, and sometimes when I travelled, I would see someone wearing something from an old collection or with somebody else’s clothes and I would think, that’s his life and I love that.
Nichanian says she was thinking of her father, the tiny detail on his jacket, inside his pocket, on his pants. And never a logo. Plus the feeling for quality, the sensuality, the voluptuousness, the colour, because she loved colour. “Selfish clothes,” she called them, because the detail is all for the wearer. Almost a couture sensibility, in fact. “Well, I did design couture,” she adds. There was nobody else doing anything like it in menswear at that time, and not just because she was the only woman doing a men’s line. Critics were instantly enchanted. “What was nice was that when Jean-Louis Dumas hired me, he said, ‘Do your little business on a big business.’ So I was feeling like, I can do it, I have the muscle of Hermès behind me to give me confidence and courage. He asked me if I wanted to have my own name and I said, ‘No, I don’t have an ego problem.’ I feel comfortable doing what I dreamed of doing, and so I’m a happy person.”
Of course, at the beginning there were nerves. Nichanian wanted a clear break with her Italian experience. Though 1988 was a big moment for the Hermès tie, she didn’t use a single tie in her second collection. She worried if it was Hermès enough, especially because she was showing leather jeans and leather chaps. But that was a breakthrough for her. She realized she could do what she wanted. “I said to a French journalist, I’m living the best job in the world for creativity, because on the inside, I have complete freedom.”
Even then, with an item as specific as chaps, Nichanian insists she never had a particular man in mind when she designed. Prod her a bit and she mentions the French actors Maurice Ronet (in La Piscine) and Yves Montand (she quotes him in César et Rosalie, “I can kill for you”). She’ll also concede that a run-in with the original blue-eyed bad boy Terence Stamp in the London hatter Locke had a big effect on her. She has always liked “men who have something in the soul, in the head, a funny man.” And the collections, with their twists and unexpected side-steps, have reflected that as well. She remembers opening her third show with a pajama jumpsuit: “Something to say, let’s have fun. Otherwise you are a really conservative man, so it’s boring. I don’t like a man who is too bourgeois. Let’s make them sexy, a little bit bad.” Although The iffiest reviews Nichanian ever got were for an all-blue collection which featured semi-naked men in bathing suits with pareos.
Given that Nichanian’s professional life has been devoted to dressing men, it seems fair enough to wonder if she’s ever asked herself what it would be like to be one. I’m also thinking of all those male designers making often marvellous things for women. Do they ever wonder what it really feels like inside their dresses or their shoes? Nichanian insists the thought has never crossed her mind. “I don’t dream of being a man, not even Jude Law,” Nichanian says with a snort of laughter. “I like ordinary men and I want to dress them, I don’t want to change them. I’m not going to say, ‘Okay, if you put my clothes on, you will be so smart and so sexy.’ Even my friends, they make some mistakes, and I love that because it’s charming. Sometimes they say to me, ‘I changed three times before having dinner with you.’ I tell them, ‘I don’t care, you’re my friend, I love you.’” But after she’s thought for a minute, she adds, “It’s not that there is no dream. I dream a lot of men, but I just want to propose them things to feel better with themselves. More sexy, more strong. But it’s not a fantasme. A piece of clothing is a form of architecture, a structure for your life, and you inhabit a garment the same way you inhabit a house.” With her experience, she believes she would make a good architect. She intends to (re)visit some of her favourite buildings now she has more time.
Self-analysis is not a trait Nichanian is partial to. She has no regrets — or maybe just one small tremor. Years ago, she became good friends with Martin Margiela when he was designing the women’s collection for Hermès. “When he was starting his men’s line, he said, ‘You told me that a men’s line is difficult, and it’s true. It’s much more difficult than a women’s line because the rules of menswear are so different.’ And I was happy he said that, because it is so different.” Nichanian feels that is maybe why menswear was never promoted in schools the way womenswear was: more rulebound, less lucrative, less freedom. For her, they are all misconceptions. “What is interesting, and I think what people miss about me — it’s maybe something I regret — is all the work I’ve done on the fabrics, on the material, on the leather, because it was my vocabulary, not just the colours, but also the material. If you only see it on the runway, if you don’t come and touch it and look at it, you don’t understand exactly the work. It’s not obvious. People say it’s too normal. They don’t understand. When you see something that looks knitted, and it’s cashmere but with leather and it’s made in a very particular way… I made so many fabrics that nobody understood.”
That could be one of the issues she has with social media. “You’ll see a nice picture of a look but when you see the actual clothes, they’re not nice clothes.” The way that people experience fashion has clearly changed radically over Nichanian’s decades at Hermès. Has the social media generation made her job more difficult? Her response is a surprise. “It’s different, because I don’t think people have the same kinds of expectations. They’re less demanding now… When I’m in the store, and I look at the way men dress, the way they choose, 30 or 40 years ago they didn’t have this confidence. Now they accept themselves, and the younger generations especially wear what they want. They are really comfortable in their bodies and their lives. They are more true.”
It seems like an appropriate moment to ask Nichanian how she feels about the state of fashion today, especially as she views it from the Olympian heights of Hermès with its €225 billion market cap. It’s not her favourite subject. “There’s so much change, it loses something magic, the something that makes people happy. When I talk to my friends at the different houses, they’re not happy. It’s not only insecurity, it’s pressure. The houses have to find the right créateur and sometimes they don’t give them the time to express what they want to express.” She has had 38 years to do exactly that, and she can talk about the conjunction of innovation and craft all she wants, but she really nailed the essence of her story when she uttered the word “magic.”
