Quiet achiever

HERMES has appointed the relatively unknown Christophe Lemaire, a follower of "slow fashion", to replace Jean Paul Gaultier.

Hermes

THE official biography of Christophe Lemaire, as supplied by his employer, is not what you'd expect for a fashion designer.

Typically, such documents are lengthy and can run to several pages. They are often full of accolades and awards, as well as philosophies about fashion and design and so on. To say Lemaire’s biography is brief would be an understatement. It’s four short sentences covering some key dates in his professional life. If this were a resume for a job application, he’d be lucky to make the long list.

Last year, despite his low profile, Lemaire managed to get on the short list – the very top of the short list, in fact – for one of the plummiest jobs in fashion: artistic director of women’s wear for French luxury house Hermes. It was an appointment that took many in the industry by surprise, including Lemaire. “It was a pretty simple process,” he says over coffee in the Hermes offices in the Paris suburb of Pantin. “I got a phone call one day, asking me to meet someone and it was secret at first. The funny thing is that I guessed which company it was – it was kind of intuition. I thought: Wow, if it’s what I’m thinking of, then that’s pretty great. It was a strange mix of surprise and anxiety.”

Lemaire, 46, launched his own label in 1991, and while it has always been critically well received, it has struggled to be commercially successful. He describes the difference between designing for Hermes and for himself as “like driving a Jaguar and then having to ride a bicycle”.

In 2000, he became artistic director of the famous French sportswear brand Lacoste (while simultaneously running his eponymous business) and garnered acclaim for transforming the company from a purveyor of crocodiled polo shirts into a fully fledged fashion sportswear brand.

But it wasn’t just Lemaire’s fashion pedigree that left even close watchers of the industry confused about his appointment at Hermes. Many observers thought the only connection between Lacoste and Hermes was that they were both French. Even more perplexing was he just wasn’t that well known. After all, his predecessor at Hermes was Jean Paul Gaultier who, like John Galliano and Marc Jacobs, is a designer whose own image is as famous as the clothes he creates, if not more so. The appointment of Lemaire to Hermes, which occurred around the same time that Sarah Burton was named to replace Alexander McQueen and Giles Deacon was announced as the designer for Ungaro, led the International Herald Tribune’s fashion critic, Suzy Menkes, to declare that “the era of the star designer picked to create buzz and shake up the system in a venerable house is over”.

And that is a comment that would no doubt please the low-key Lemaire, who deliberately shies away from publicity and loathes what he describes as the media circus of the fashion industry. “What is shown on the catwalk is all showbiz and entertainment and then the commercial collection that is in the stores is completely different,” he says of what frustrates him about fashion’s almost insatiable thirst for publicity.

“Hermes is not like that; this is a very down-to-earth company,” says Lemaire. “The client is the most important thing and this house has been built on the quality of its products, its craftsmanship and the clients. And I think that’s fair and how it should be. We are doing a collection to be sold, not only to be an image. So everything that was in the show you can find in the store, except for maybe one or two things that could not be produced for technical reasons. I find that a very honest way to be.”

Lemaire is so modest that he’s almost an anti-fashion figure. His designs, which are often described as minimalist, are the sort of clothes you can wear season after season. The fashion system, on the other hand, demands that designers produce a whole new collection every six months and that it be vastly different to previous collections. Department stores and design houses need to maintain growth and if customers are wearing the same clothes season in and season out, then that growth is obviously stymied. And if you add quality craftsmanship and the finest materials to the mix, then customers have little need to go out and buy new clothes each season.

“I’m against reinvention every six months,” says Lemaire. “Just because I think it’s not true you have to change your wardrobe every six months. I’m interested in style more than fashion and if you observe people with style, you see they have a kind of personal uniform. They play around with a personal vocabulary and that’s what I’m interested in. Hermes is very special, it’s not really fashion. It’s not really luxury either and we don’t use that word luxury here because it doesn’t mean much. It’s been used a lot. We say we create useful objects of extreme quality. So that’s the philosophy at Hermes and for fashion that’s an interesting concept to work within.”

Jean Paul Gaultier left Hermes after seven years designing the women’s collection and during his time the fashion shows were often elaborately staged and extravagant (his last show featured a live dressage display). Lemaire says he sees his concept of the Hermes woman as more in keeping with that of the reclusive Belgian designer Martin Margiela, who preceded Gaultier at Hermes. “More and more, I’d like to go inside the clothes, to create clothes as objects. That’s something I’m very attached to and that’s something that’s very much in the culture of Hermes. The inside of the clothes are to be as beautiful as the outside, with the construction going down to the essential. I’m very attached to this essential side of Hermes, which is quite minimalistic, but also flamboyant, with a kind of synthesis between minimal and rich.”

Lemaire is the first to admit that he wasn’t the most obvious choice to take the reins at Hermes. “I wasn’t the most famous designer. So, yes, it was a risk for Pierre-Alexis Dumas [artistic director of Hermes] to recruit me. For me, it was also a question of whether I was able to rise to this challenge. So for the first season everyone was kind of questioning me, but in a very positive and constructive way. Hermes is very much like a family really and it’s probably less corporate than anywhere else that I’ve worked, where everything is compartmentalised. It’s a little more messy, but in a positive way.”

As he tells it, Hermes sounds like the ultimate house for a designer. When Lemaire presented the vision for his first collection for Hermes and his concept for the show, he asked Dumas whether he was comfortable with the direction it was going in and whether he thought it was a good one for Hermes. According to Lemaire, Dumas replied: “It’s not for me to say. You’re here to surprise us and to take us somewhere else.”

“That’s pretty rare in this business,” says Lemaire. “And you know what? It worked. The sales of the collection are going well, so I feel much more comfortable now.”

Lemaire’s first Hermes collection - Autumn/Winter 2011 - was presented in Paris earlier this year at the company’s newest boutique, on the rue de Sevres on the Left Bank.

“I felt that it should be a different experience and I wanted something comfortable,” he says. “I thought it should be
intimate and that it shouldn’t be a regular fashion show with big music, big lights and a big crowd. From the start, I had this idea of something suspended in time.”

For the collection show, Lemaire had a musician play a Chinese zither as an accompaniment, which was slow and meditative. “I wanted the models to walk very slowly.

I would have even liked more smiling and for them to be relaxed. I just wanted it to be different. I think we live in a society now where everything goes too fast, especially in fashion. And to create something of quality you need time. I’m not trying to be overly philosophical, but I do believe that if you are looking for quality in something, you need time. Time to dream, time to step back and say it’s not for me, or time just to think where you should go or not go. You need to try and miss and retry. I think that’s Hermes and that’s luxury. Real luxury is time.”