In the Santa Monica Mountains, just above the Getty Museum's classical colonnade, Hermès staged a spectacle that felt less like a runway and more like a séance with lingerie's past. The house's Women Fall-Winter 2026 Second Chapter, titled "Silhouettes on the Horizon," arrived in Los Angeles with a distinctly intimate edge - leather harnesses worn as bra tops, sheer chiffon skirts billowing over riding boots, and corseted silhouettes that echoed the structural foundations of 19th-century foundation garments. Artistic director Nadège Vanhée, who jogged the full length of the winding runway with a red-haired abandon rare among her European peers, described the collection as "the interplay of tension and release," a phrase that could just as easily apply to the history of corsetry itself. Indeed, the black leather harness tops recalled the boned bustiers of the 1890s, when rigid stays gave way to more flexible forms of support - a shift that allowed women to breathe, move, and eventually, to ride horses in the very boots Hermès has been crafting since 1837. The brand's equestrian heritage, born in a Parisian harness workshop, found its West Coast echo in suede riding boots paired with egg-shaped yellow dresses and monochrome leather suits. The crowd - a mix of young Hermès devotees and Hollywood stylists - wore the house's mini Kelly bags like talismans, some dangling smaller Kelly charms from their handles, a playful nod to the way Victorian women wore chatelaines at their waist. Miley Cyrus arrived in a sleeveless leather mini, pure punk rock; Natasha Lyonne, in a leather corset and jeans, laughed that she never dressed so boldly in New York. It was a reminder that lingerie, like fashion, is always a negotiation between restraint and release - and that Hermès, long known for silk scarves and saddle stitching, is now writing a new chapter in that story, one that begins with a corset and ends with a traffic jam on the hill. Because even in Hollywood, some tensions can't be released.
Originally reported by The Hollywood Reporter