Summer Forever At Hermès Men’s Summer 2026 Runway Show

At 35 degrees in Paris during the recent men’s fashion week, the only place you really wanted to be was at the Hermès show at Palais d’Iéna, located between Place de l’Étoile and the Arc de Triomphe on the banks of the Seine. To witness the collection that was about to unfold, of course, but also for a cold swig of champagne on arrival and a cold flannel handed out to all guests, and then retrieved just before you entered the show space. The culture of care as seen in the hands of Hermès.

The totemic show on the fashion calendar, much like its womenswear counterpart, is held at the same location each season. Consistency breeds clarity, as they say. One knows exactly what to expect, except that the white walled interior of the Palais d’Iéna is tweaked to reset the imagination each time.

On this particular occasion, there were mirrors facing each other, giving the illusion of an endless room, yet at the same time, a circular one. Brightly filled with a kaleidoscope of shapes, a trompe-l’oeil at play. And then, as the first look came out, the mise-en-scène made perfect sense: a putty coloured T-shirt with open lattice work on its sloping shoulders, and a neckscarf, tied together so insouciantly, you almost wanted to touch it. The collection, with its colours like ‘elephant grey’ (you only have to close your eyes to imagine it), ‘ice cube’—an actual hue—chilled and sharp against dusty citrus tones, clay, butter, mint, and faded raspberry, came alive in the endless blue-sky horizon created by the mirrors hovering above us. It’s the kind of chromatic thinking Hermès excels at. Not just picking colours, but conjuring actual, pure moments. Like one colour called ‘the greys of still-warm stones.’ You just get it.

Of course, no Hermès show is quite complete without standout accessories to write home about. There were sculptural canvas and calfskin duffel bags with rounded corners, their quiet geometry balanced by those tobacco straps. Oversized totes with exaggerated top handles looked made for long weekends and long walks. Although, frankly, I think it should be made in a similar size for women to contain the contents of our lives.

Sandals, open-toed and rope-soled, extended the line of the leg, and inhabited a kind of nonchalant practicality. The sort of thing you’d want your elegant beau to pack for Stromboli, but end up wearing every day, a quotidian hot-weather staple.

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Most of all, though, it was the softness that pushed through for me. “I was looking for lightness,” said Véronique Nichanian, creative director of menswear at the maison, in a post-show interview with the press. And that lightness was certainly there—in the semi-transparent sheer of a shirt, in the leather latticework travelling down a pair of trousers, in the leather scarves, ‘shaped at length into immateriality,’ moveable and malleable like skin, and in the jewellery that punctuated every look. Silver Clou de Forge reed bracelets, Collier de Chien cuffs, Boucle Sellier and Clou d’H rings in white gold and diamonds, didn’t weigh down wrists or fingers, but sparkled just long enough to be noticed.

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In a conversation I’d had prior with the co-founder of Indian homegrown design label 11.11 eleven / eleven, Mia Morikawa, her own take on the future of menswear rang clear after witnessing the Hermès men’s show. There’s a softness so prevalent and permeable right now in men’s clothing, a strong and powerful retaliation to the harshness of our times, perhaps? Because, after all, when you slip into that sheer gossamer shirt, or when you wear that piece of light-as-air jewellery, you will very likely move differently through the world. With grace, with kindness, and if there’s one thing Hermès has shown us repeatedly, it is that kindness is the greatest of all accessories. Whether as a cold drink and towel handed out to guests as a respite from the soaring sun, or as clothes that dissolve into skin.

And while Nichanian’s ‘just a nice, cool guy in the city!’ menswear aesthetic is quickly becoming everyone’s ideal internet boyfriend, I, for one, am more interested in borrowing the whole wardrobe for myself—jewellery, scarves, and bags the size of my limbs, included.

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