Hermès softens luxury with ballet-inspired ease in Los Angeles
Hermès turned Bel Air into a pale-yellow pavilion, using ballet-soft dresses and draped Carré shapes to make ease look like status.
Hermès traded its usual precision for something looser and more seductive in Bel Air, where Nadège Vanhée-Cybulski built a collection around movement, drape and the kind of California ease that now reads as luxury. The house’s third Chapter Two presentation for women’s ready-to-wear, staged on June 4, 2026, turned a month-built structure in the hills above Los Angeles into an argument for softness as the new power signal.
The format itself matters. Hermès launched Chapter Two in New York in June 2024, continued it in Shanghai in June 2025 and brought it to Los Angeles after first unveiling Chapter One of the fall 2026 collection in Paris on March 7, 2026, at the Garde Republicaine. The traveling structure is designed to carry the Paris runway story through the identity of each city, and Los Angeles gave Hermès a particularly apt backdrop: a sun-washed, design-conscious stage where restraint can feel more expensive than display.
Vanhée-Cybulski leaned into dresses, turning the house’s Carré scarf into a dressmaking idea rather than a finishing touch. The fabric was draped around the body and then sharpened into construction, a subtle shift that made the collection feel less like a formal exercise and more like clothing in motion. Ballet informed the line throughout, from supple leather parkas and wrap-effect dresses to sculptural bustier silhouettes that echoed pointe shoes and ballet slippers. It was Hermès at its most fluid, but never unfocused.
That softness also put Hermès squarely in the same relaxed-elegance lane as coastal grandmother style, only with Parisian engineering behind it. The palette moved from butter yellow into vivid reds and deep greens and blacks, echoing the fade from golden hour into midnight. On the runway, that progression gave the clothes the same appeal as the best modern coastal dressing: linen energy without the literal linen, ease without sloppiness, polish without stiffness.
The scene outside the clothes reinforced the point. Guests were shuttled by golf cart to a secluded pavilion in Bel Air, while the crowd itself doubled as a fashion parade, with Miley Cyrus, Keke Palmer, Kerry Washington, Natasha Lyonne and Julia Louis-Dreyfus among those seen at the presentation. Hermès arrived in Los Angeles with French craftsmanship intact, but the message was unmistakably West Coast: the most current luxury is no longer armored. It moves, it drapes and it looks better when it does.
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