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| Hermès’s Refusal to Change Is Its Most Radical Gesture Yet | Hermès’s Refusal to Change Is Its Most Radical Gesture Yet |
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| IF THERE IS a signifying gesture that contains nearly 200 years of obsession, it is the ballet of the point sellier. This is how it begins: The artisan is young, maybe 35, with a confidence that comes from years on the bench, eyes focused on two small back-to-back precut pieces of leather. She holds in each hand a two-inch needle, threaded with linen fiber that she has dragged through beeswax to render waterproof. Then, wielding the needles like surgical instruments, she pierces the leather, pulling taut the threads to draw the halves together in an unbreakable bond. Whether it’s bleu saphir for the panel of a Birkin or tawny caramel for a harness or juniper suede for the shoulder of a blazer — it would depend on which of the 16 ateliers she works in — the motion, as percussive as the clash of cymbals at the climax of a symphony, has been the same since the leather craftsman Thierry Hermès left Germany for Paris, using just such a stitch to craft harnesses for the gentry at the company he founded in 1837. | IF THERE IS a signifying gesture that contains nearly 200 years of obsession, it is the ballet of the point sellier. This is how it begins: The artisan is young, maybe 35, with a confidence that comes from years on the bench, eyes focused on two small back-to-back precut pieces of leather. She holds in each hand a two-inch needle, threaded with linen fiber that she has dragged through beeswax to render waterproof. Then, wielding the needles like surgical instruments, she pierces the leather, pulling taut the threads to draw the halves together in an unbreakable bond. Whether it’s bleu saphir for the panel of a Birkin or tawny caramel for a harness or juniper suede for the shoulder of a blazer — it would depend on which of the 16 ateliers she works in — the motion, as percussive as the clash of cymbals at the climax of a symphony, has been the same since the leather craftsman Thierry Hermès left Germany for Paris, using just such a stitch to craft harnesses for the gentry at the company he founded in 1837. |
| The handbag — or the jacket, the briefcase, the chair — will possess no overt logo (a few accessories sport an “H,” but privately most people inside the company regard branding with a slight wince). It will be the artisan’s from start to finish, through the gluing and the feather-light sanding and the infinitesimal strokes of dye applied at the edges by an ultrafine brush and the tap-tap of a tiny hammer that ensures the hardware is perfectly aligned and anchored for posterity to the skins. It will take days, or in the case of a larger item — like a saddle, still made in the workshop where Hermès’s only son, Charles-Émile, moved the company after taking over in 1880, on the top floor of a building on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, above what is now the flagship store — maybe weeks. It will be perfect and will cost more than virtually any other such item you can buy off a shelf (the company also keeps several ateliers just for custom orders, another magnitude of extravagance), though ever so slightly different from all the others because of the particular hand used to create it. “We would never think of having someone just do all the sewing and then another person do the hardware,” says Céline Rochereau, who after 30 years in the handbag ateliers in France and workshops worldwide now keeps track of the dozens of artisans Hermès posts, like foreign attachés, in cities around the world, in case a customer in Shanghai or Seoul or San Francisco needs a closure tweaked or a stain removed. “You put your mark on it from start to finish; it is yours.” | The handbag — or the jacket, the briefcase, the chair — will possess no overt logo (a few accessories sport an “H,” but privately most people inside the company regard branding with a slight wince). It will be the artisan’s from start to finish, through the gluing and the feather-light sanding and the infinitesimal strokes of dye applied at the edges by an ultrafine brush and the tap-tap of a tiny hammer that ensures the hardware is perfectly aligned and anchored for posterity to the skins. It will take days, or in the case of a larger item — like a saddle, still made in the workshop where Hermès’s only son, Charles-Émile, moved the company after taking over in 1880, on the top floor of a building on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, above what is now the flagship store — maybe weeks. It will be perfect and will cost more than virtually any other such item you can buy off a shelf (the company also keeps several ateliers just for custom orders, another magnitude of extravagance), though ever so slightly different from all the others because of the particular hand used to create it. “We would never think of having someone just do all the sewing and then another person do the hardware,” says Céline Rochereau, who after 30 years in the handbag ateliers in France and workshops worldwide now keeps track of the dozens of artisans Hermès posts, like foreign attachés, in cities around the world, in case a customer in Shanghai or Seoul or San Francisco needs a closure tweaked or a stain removed. “You put your mark on it from start to finish; it is yours.” |
| There are other European makers of exquisite things that keep a few workshops staffed with artisans; some French companies with historic beginnings even maintain small ateliers with several dozen white-coat-clad seamstresses, vestiges of the house’s origin. But no multinational company stands so fixedly with its past as Hermès. Despite now having over 300 stores, from Denver to the Northern Mariana Islands, the enterprise clings resolutely to the romance of the human touch in the face of manifest and mounting impracticalities. In this, the company maintains the tradition of Europe’s medieval craft guilds, run by generations of journeymen and apprentices who, hammers and edge bevelers in hand, started dying out in the 16th century as private industry rose. As the world — fashion, especially — has increasingly become mechanized to control costs and capitalize instantly on trends, Hermès has resisted, defiantly waiting out the glossy and the ephemeral, certain all along that if you hand-make elegant things, labor costs and materials be damned, there will always be enough people with a great deal of money and taste to buy them. Its very existence is a challenge — and a rebuke. | There are other European makers of exquisite things that keep a few workshops staffed with artisans; some French companies with historic beginnings even maintain small ateliers with several dozen white-coat-clad seamstresses, vestiges of the house’s origin. But no multinational company stands so fixedly with its past as Hermès. Despite now having over 300 stores, from Denver to the Northern Mariana Islands, the enterprise clings resolutely to the romance of the human touch in the face of manifest and mounting impracticalities. In this, the company maintains the tradition of Europe’s medieval craft guilds, run by generations of journeymen and apprentices who, hammers and edge bevelers in hand, started dying out in the 16th century as private industry rose. As the world — fashion, especially — has increasingly become mechanized to control costs and capitalize instantly on trends, Hermès has resisted, defiantly waiting out the glossy and the ephemeral, certain all along that if you hand-make elegant things, labor costs and materials be damned, there will always be enough people with a great deal of money and taste to buy them. Its very existence is a challenge — and a rebuke. |
| THE AUTOMOBILE OUGHT to have ended Hermès. The company’s original raison d’être was the horse, for whom it made every accouterment, from bridle to saddle. But by 1920, the Hermès family, which was headed by Thierry’s grandson Émile-Maurice, had discovered that their customers’ appetite would endure no matter what the mode of transportation. Just a couple decades after the debut of the Haut à Courroies, a 16- or 20-inch-wide bag big enough to stow a saddle (the Kelly, popularized in the 1950s by the actress Grace Kelly, is essentially a scaled-down version), the company began making a handbag to stow in the trunk of a sports car. Next, having secured the French rights to a little-known turn-of-the-century American invention, the zipper, Hermès used it to make a golf jacket, leading the company into the apparel business. | THE AUTOMOBILE OUGHT to have ended Hermès. The company’s original raison d’être was the horse, for whom it made every accouterment, from bridle to saddle. But by 1920, the Hermès family, which was headed by Thierry’s grandson Émile-Maurice, had discovered that their customers’ appetite would endure no matter what the mode of transportation. Just a couple decades after the debut of the Haut à Courroies, a 16- or 20-inch-wide bag big enough to stow a saddle (the Kelly, popularized in the 1950s by the actress Grace Kelly, is essentially a scaled-down version), the company began making a handbag to stow in the trunk of a sports car. Next, having secured the French rights to a little-known turn-of-the-century American invention, the zipper, Hermès used it to make a golf jacket, leading the company into the apparel business. |
| Still, the family held tight to its equestrian roots, basing the shape of a perfume bottle on the contour of a stirrup or a coat closure on a harness bit, and thus maintaining an instantly recognizable iconography (its tiny duc carriage logo began appearing in 1950, long after horses had disappeared from the mainstream), one that to this day telegraphs gentility tempered by an earthy outdoorsiness. Even as it introduced men’s and women’s ready-to-wear, silk scarves, shoes, porcelain, jewelry and fragrance in the 20th century, and grew to a $4-billion-a-year international enterprise in the 21st, the family insisted that virtually everything continue to be crafted by hand; they sensed that once you try to stretch that legacy to embrace the shiny and the new, its power is forever lost. | Still, the family held tight to its equestrian roots, basing the shape of a perfume bottle on the contour of a stirrup or a coat closure on a harness bit, and thus maintaining an instantly recognizable iconography (its tiny duc carriage logo began appearing in 1950, long after horses had disappeared from the mainstream), one that to this day telegraphs gentility tempered by an earthy outdoorsiness. Even as it introduced men’s and women’s ready-to-wear, silk scarves, shoes, porcelain, jewelry and fragrance in the 20th century, and grew to a $4-billion-a-year international enterprise in the 21st, the family insisted that virtually everything continue to be crafted by hand; they sensed that once you try to stretch that legacy to embrace the shiny and the new, its power is forever lost. |
| While family control has offered a comforting permanence, Hermès, with its roots in the workshop, is uniquely decentralized. With no “Monsieur” or “Madame,” the modern company hews instead to the contours of the guilds: There are separate ateliers (and corresponding heads) for women’s ready-to-wear, perfume, shoes and jewelry, men’s wear, silk and home furnishings. In France, where the couture tradition has helped keep handwork vital (perhaps only Japan has guarded it as doggedly), this was once called the corps de métier, a web of semiautonomous, highly specialized studios where artisans, trained from apprenticeship, produced a single category of item. Hermès, now run by the family’s sixth generation, tends to choose cerebral leaders, ones comfortable subsuming their egos to the whole, recognizing that the brand relies as much on skilled artisans as on the sketch pad. | While family control has offered a comforting permanence, Hermès, with its roots in the workshop, is uniquely decentralized. With no “Monsieur” or “Madame,” the modern company hews instead to the contours of the guilds: There are separate ateliers (and corresponding heads) for women’s ready-to-wear, perfume, shoes and jewelry, men’s wear, silk and home furnishings. In France, where the couture tradition has helped keep handwork vital (perhaps only Japan has guarded it as doggedly), this was once called the corps de métier, a web of semiautonomous, highly specialized studios where artisans, trained from apprenticeship, produced a single category of item. Hermès, now run by the family’s sixth generation, tends to choose cerebral leaders, ones comfortable subsuming their egos to the whole, recognizing that the brand relies as much on skilled artisans as on the sketch pad. |
| In fact, much of what distinguishes the company are its anachronisms, the kind that any consultancy would (should Hermès care what a consultancy thinks) surely urge them to reconsider. Today, the company has over 13,400 employees, 4,000 of whom — an unheard-of ratio for an international luxury business — are craftspeople. Trained in a yearlong in-house academy, followed by one to two years under the watchful eye of a tutor, they labor in buildings throughout Paris’s Eighth Arrondissement and in a vast 27-year-old complex in a suburb called Pantin and small satellite ateliers throughout northeastern France. Even in the main Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré building, their workshops are sprinkled everywhere; you cannot walk down a corridor — even next to the top executives’ suites — without spotting a glass door behind which artisans are running up samples on sewing machines or piecing together intricate designs. | In fact, much of what distinguishes the company are its anachronisms, the kind that any consultancy would (should Hermès care what a consultancy thinks) surely urge them to reconsider. Today, the company has over 13,400 employees, 4,000 of whom — an unheard-of ratio for an international luxury business — are craftspeople. Trained in a yearlong in-house academy, followed by one to two years under the watchful eye of a tutor, they labor in buildings throughout Paris’s Eighth Arrondissement and in a vast 27-year-old complex in a suburb called Pantin and small satellite ateliers throughout northeastern France. Even in the main Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré building, their workshops are sprinkled everywhere; you cannot walk down a corridor — even next to the top executives’ suites — without spotting a glass door behind which artisans are running up samples on sewing machines or piecing together intricate designs. |
| In a universe of runway to closet, the company remains politely contemptuous of glitz and unapologetically dear. In retrospect, such a retrograde philosophy has proved prophetic: Other companies that chased young customers by introducing a plethora of entry-level offerings realized too late how delicate a legacy can be. “You know if it is right,” says Charlotte Macaux Perelman, an architect who was recruited in 2014 with Alexis Fabry, an art curator and book publisher, to run the furniture and housewares atelier, as she reflects on the three years and dozens of prototypes it took to find the Japanese craftsmen to make the silken curved bamboo, strengthened by imperceptibly small slivers of carbon fiber, for the leather-topped stools by the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza. “And if it’s wrong, you can’t live with it. No matter how long it takes you to find the right answer, you just keep looking.” | In a universe of runway to closet, the company remains politely contemptuous of glitz and unapologetically dear. In retrospect, such a retrograde philosophy has proved prophetic: Other companies that chased young customers by introducing a plethora of entry-level offerings realized too late how delicate a legacy can be. “You know if it is right,” says Charlotte Macaux Perelman, an architect who was recruited in 2014 with Alexis Fabry, an art curator and book publisher, to run the furniture and housewares atelier, as she reflects on the three years and dozens of prototypes it took to find the Japanese craftsmen to make the silken curved bamboo, strengthened by imperceptibly small slivers of carbon fiber, for the leather-topped stools by the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza. “And if it’s wrong, you can’t live with it. No matter how long it takes you to find the right answer, you just keep looking.” |
| AN HERMÈS SILK takes about two years to complete, a process that may take weeks at another house where silk scarves — though big moneymakers — are mostly a riff on that season’s patterns and colors. | AN HERMÈS SILK takes about two years to complete, a process that may take weeks at another house where silk scarves — though big moneymakers — are mostly a riff on that season’s patterns and colors. |
| Perhaps the company’s most iconic symbol (apart from the orange box, which was introduced in 1940 after the vellum ones that had been used for a century grew scarce in wartime), scarves were introduced in 1937 and are referred to in-house as “carrés,” for their square shape. They have been produced for the past 16 years under the aegis of Bali Barret, in an esoteric manner that is more like creating an illuminated manuscript than manufacturing something to be tied around your neck. | Perhaps the company’s most iconic symbol (apart from the orange box, which was introduced in 1940 after the vellum ones that had been used for a century grew scarce in wartime), scarves were introduced in 1937 and are referred to in-house as “carrés,” for their square shape. They have been produced for the past 16 years under the aegis of Bali Barret, in an esoteric manner that is more like creating an illuminated manuscript than manufacturing something to be tied around your neck. |
| For the 20 designs — 10 each for the spring and fall collections — there are hundreds of proposed sketches from outside artists and illustrators. Barret is an impresario, cajoling artists and scouring the world for new talent, nurturing the ones she feels may someday make the cut. Like her colleagues in the other ateliers, she keeps meticulous archives; among her tools are thousands of hand-bound volumes of past designs, which she studies to avoid repetition and to spark ideas. | For the 20 designs — 10 each for the spring and fall collections — there are hundreds of proposed sketches from outside artists and illustrators. Barret is an impresario, cajoling artists and scouring the world for new talent, nurturing the ones she feels may someday make the cut. Like her colleagues in the other ateliers, she keeps meticulous archives; among her tools are thousands of hand-bound volumes of past designs, which she studies to avoid repetition and to spark ideas. |
| Sometimes — again, like her fellow designers — she repairs to the Collection, a grand private museum of more than 20,000 non-Hermès artifacts and antiques first amassed by Émile-Maurice (1871-1951) in a series of mahogany-lined rooms on the fourth floor of the building on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The holdings, which are overseen by a full-time curator, range from a 17th-century Mongolian saddle to Victorian silver spurs to the rocking horse the Hermès children rode in the 19th century. The final mix of silks is a purely instinctual combination of the classic and the abstract. | Sometimes — again, like her fellow designers — she repairs to the Collection, a grand private museum of more than 20,000 non-Hermès artifacts and antiques first amassed by Émile-Maurice (1871-1951) in a series of mahogany-lined rooms on the fourth floor of the building on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The holdings, which are overseen by a full-time curator, range from a 17th-century Mongolian saddle to Victorian silver spurs to the rocking horse the Hermès children rode in the 19th century. The final mix of silks is a purely instinctual combination of the classic and the abstract. |
| The silk atelier in Lyon, two hours southeast by bullet train, has a color workshop with 25 employees, where the inks are hand-mixed for each of the season’s silks (there are eight to 12 colorways per design). Barret scoffs at Pantone color charts — “Absurde” — preferring to work instead from the house’s own 75,000 registered hues. Most Tuesdays, members of the Lyon team travel to Paris to present prototypes. Barret stands before a huge whiteboard with the silks affixed with magnets in rows, giving critiques. The sessions can last up to nine hours. The following Tuesday, the team returns for Barret to give them feedback on the newly executed strike-offs, and then the Tuesday after that, until she is satisfied. | The silk atelier in Lyon, two hours southeast by bullet train, has a color workshop with 25 employees, where the inks are hand-mixed for each of the season’s silks (there are eight to 12 colorways per design). Barret scoffs at Pantone color charts — “Absurde” — preferring to work instead from the house’s own 75,000 registered hues. Most Tuesdays, members of the Lyon team travel to Paris to present prototypes. Barret stands before a huge whiteboard with the silks affixed with magnets in rows, giving critiques. The sessions can last up to nine hours. The following Tuesday, the team returns for Barret to give them feedback on the newly executed strike-offs, and then the Tuesday after that, until she is satisfied. |
| This is all before the actual production, of course: A scarf can have as many as 45 different screens on which individual colors are applied to be pressed onto the thick silk, itself loomed in an Hermès workshop in Pantin from 300 raw cocoons. “Creating the silks,” says Barret, “is the most pure, as close to a painting as you get, a perfect object.” | This is all before the actual production, of course: A scarf can have as many as 45 different screens on which individual colors are applied to be pressed onto the thick silk, itself loomed in an Hermès workshop in Pantin from 300 raw cocoons. “Creating the silks,” says Barret, “is the most pure, as close to a painting as you get, a perfect object.” |
| LAST YEAR IT was “Let’s play!” This year it’s “In the pursuit of Hermès dreams.” Every year there is a theme, announced 36 months in advance to give the designers time to find their inspiration. It is revealed at a private dinner by Pierre-Alexis Dumas, the sixth-generation Hermès scion who became the artistic director after his father, Jean-Louis, who ran both the creative and business sides for 28 years, announced his retirement in 2005. (Pierre-Alexis’s cousin Axel is now the C.E.O. The company is publicly held but still controlled by the family.) He gathers the creative directors, as did his father after inaugurating the tradition in 1987 (this being France, a philosophe is invited to discourse, often arcanely, on the theme’s meaning). Pierre Hardy, who has designed shoes for the house for nearly 30 years, and is also in charge of jewelry and accessories (which includes belts, hats and gloves) likes to be both literal and playful, so for this year, there are floating cutout clouds on suede platform shoes and sputnik heels; Véronique Nichanian, who has been the men’s wear designer for more than 30 years, added an image of a dragon carrying a calèche for fall. Christine Nagel, the in-house perfumer who in 2016 succeeded the legendary Jean-Claude Ellena, chose to regard it in the abstract, with a floral perfume that “mixes the sweetness of white musk” with “the scent of daydreaming.” | |
| By all accounts, this is about as heavy-handed as creative oversight gets at Hermès. Dumas, who is tall, loose-limbed and studied visual art at Brown University, may best be understood by a visit to the office he keeps in the Eighth Arrondissement: It is exuberantly cluttered and imperfect — not at all what one might expect. There is good art, most of it conceptual, including a large optical sculpture by the French artist Gabriel Leger, but also half-unpacked boxes (though Dumas moved in over three years ago), and long, low shelving units loaded with art books and auction catalogs and topped with random stacks of sentimental tchotchkes, including a tiny windup plastic swimmer that his interior designer mother once gave to her staff as Christmas presents, a branded neon-orange hard hat and a boxed Playmobil figurine of the Greek god Hermes (no relation, though coincidentally responsible for protecting merchants and athletes). He grabs his “personal totems” from a messy pile on his desk, holding them in outstretched hands: a brass slug (“They are quite beautiful despite how people despise the poor creatures”) and a frog (“I leap”). | By all accounts, this is about as heavy-handed as creative oversight gets at Hermès. Dumas, who is tall, loose-limbed and studied visual art at Brown University, may best be understood by a visit to the office he keeps in the Eighth Arrondissement: It is exuberantly cluttered and imperfect — not at all what one might expect. There is good art, most of it conceptual, including a large optical sculpture by the French artist Gabriel Leger, but also half-unpacked boxes (though Dumas moved in over three years ago), and long, low shelving units loaded with art books and auction catalogs and topped with random stacks of sentimental tchotchkes, including a tiny windup plastic swimmer that his interior designer mother once gave to her staff as Christmas presents, a branded neon-orange hard hat and a boxed Playmobil figurine of the Greek god Hermes (no relation, though coincidentally responsible for protecting merchants and athletes). He grabs his “personal totems” from a messy pile on his desk, holding them in outstretched hands: a brass slug (“They are quite beautiful despite how people despise the poor creatures”) and a frog (“I leap”). |
| Dumas spends a lot of time pondering where Hermès is headed as the world speeds up exponentially: There are challenges to remaining an anachronism; no other company of this sort has such vertical integration, with command of much of its raw materials (Hermès reportedly has a number of crocodile ranches in Australia) and total control of many items from conception to finish. Hermès has had a robust online commerce presence since 2001, but it is an uneasy fit on social media. The digital world, says Dumas, “creates the illusion that everything is closer when in fact the important things are getting farther away.” | Dumas spends a lot of time pondering where Hermès is headed as the world speeds up exponentially: There are challenges to remaining an anachronism; no other company of this sort has such vertical integration, with command of much of its raw materials (Hermès reportedly has a number of crocodile ranches in Australia) and total control of many items from conception to finish. Hermès has had a robust online commerce presence since 2001, but it is an uneasy fit on social media. The digital world, says Dumas, “creates the illusion that everything is closer when in fact the important things are getting farther away.” |
| In the past decade, there has been a widespread cultural backlash against mechanization and a newfound celebration of handwork, which should benefit a company like Hermès, but there is still pressure to appeal to a younger generation. Dumas’s goal is to give the company’s fastidiousness a contemporary expression. As such, Hermès lately devotes a great deal of time and a massive amount of money to staging events worldwide that showcase its processes in unexpected milieus like South Korea and Tasmania. You can bring in your mother’s scarf and the company will “overdye” it for you in a futuristic-looking machine made just for the task, creating a trippy new colorway. Petit H, an atelier started in 2010 by the family member Pascale Mussard, is the company’s grand yet playful gesture toward sustainability: It gathers leftover leather scraps and silks and extra buttons and slightly imperfect crystal glassware from every corner of the operation and turns them into one-of-kind pieces, from teddy bears to Christmas ornaments to eccentric embellished handbags. | In the past decade, there has been a widespread cultural backlash against mechanization and a newfound celebration of handwork, which should benefit a company like Hermès, but there is still pressure to appeal to a younger generation. Dumas’s goal is to give the company’s fastidiousness a contemporary expression. As such, Hermès lately devotes a great deal of time and a massive amount of money to staging events worldwide that showcase its processes in unexpected milieus like South Korea and Tasmania. You can bring in your mother’s scarf and the company will “overdye” it for you in a futuristic-looking machine made just for the task, creating a trippy new colorway. Petit H, an atelier started in 2010 by the family member Pascale Mussard, is the company’s grand yet playful gesture toward sustainability: It gathers leftover leather scraps and silks and extra buttons and slightly imperfect crystal glassware from every corner of the operation and turns them into one-of-kind pieces, from teddy bears to Christmas ornaments to eccentric embellished handbags. |
| Still, maintaining a guildlike operation requires working from the bottom up. Many of the outside craftspeople with whom the company collaborates when it doesn’t have in-house expertise (Hermès insists its lacquerware, which takes three months to finish, be fashioned by a small number of artisans in Vietnam) are growing older — and their children are uninterested in carrying on. Unlike competitors who are in constant pursuit of growth, ever expanding into new categories to satisfy stockholders, Dumas and his cousin seem more inclined to pull back, to invest in cultivating craft expertise inside and among far-flung outside partners in corners of the world (part of the ethos is to pay real wages, surely among the reasons Hermès’s wares costs so much). | Still, maintaining a guildlike operation requires working from the bottom up. Many of the outside craftspeople with whom the company collaborates when it doesn’t have in-house expertise (Hermès insists its lacquerware, which takes three months to finish, be fashioned by a small number of artisans in Vietnam) are growing older — and their children are uninterested in carrying on. Unlike competitors who are in constant pursuit of growth, ever expanding into new categories to satisfy stockholders, Dumas and his cousin seem more inclined to pull back, to invest in cultivating craft expertise inside and among far-flung outside partners in corners of the world (part of the ethos is to pay real wages, surely among the reasons Hermès’s wares costs so much). |
| “NO ONE ELSE has this, a place where you take the idea where it goes. Here they don’t say, ‘Oh that will be impossible to make or it will cost too much,’” says Hardy, an erudite former dancer and illustrator. He is compulsively creative, an affliction that Axel and Pierre-Alexis have accommodated by allowing him to remain technically a freelancer; he still keeps his own eponymous Paris-based shoe line, and from 2001 to 2012, he also designed footwear for Balenciaga under Nicolas Ghesquière, who is now the artistic director of women’s collections at Louis Vuitton. But he considers Hermès his home; it reminds him of the dance world. “There is a cultness, which I find very comforting. Like a family that loves you and lets you make mistakes.” | “NO ONE ELSE has this, a place where you take the idea where it goes. Here they don’t say, ‘Oh that will be impossible to make or it will cost too much,’” says Hardy, an erudite former dancer and illustrator. He is compulsively creative, an affliction that Axel and Pierre-Alexis have accommodated by allowing him to remain technically a freelancer; he still keeps his own eponymous Paris-based shoe line, and from 2001 to 2012, he also designed footwear for Balenciaga under Nicolas Ghesquière, who is now the artistic director of women’s collections at Louis Vuitton. But he considers Hermès his home; it reminds him of the dance world. “There is a cultness, which I find very comforting. Like a family that loves you and lets you make mistakes.” |
| Shoes, like women’s ready-to-wear, which is designed by Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski, present a special challenge at Hermès; while most of the things the company makes are created to be worn or carried or sat upon for generations, shoes and clothes are subject to fashionable whims — and women’s shoes, no matter how meticulously made, get beaten up by the streets. “They are worth maybe a season or two, and then women want the new,” says Hardy, unperturbed. | Shoes, like women’s ready-to-wear, which is designed by Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski, present a special challenge at Hermès; while most of the things the company makes are created to be worn or carried or sat upon for generations, shoes and clothes are subject to fashionable whims — and women’s shoes, no matter how meticulously made, get beaten up by the streets. “They are worth maybe a season or two, and then women want the new,” says Hardy, unperturbed. |
| “You still conceive of them to the fullest,” he adds. “And you don’t let the idea of their life span, or lack of it, affect you.” His most recent foray — a sign of how Hermès is adapting to the times — has been into high-tech sneakers. The rest of the world’s athletic shoes, even if they retail for $500 or more, are made in Asian factories, but Hermès has maximized its Pantin workshop to meet the demand. “They are a completely different feat of engineering, like making a car,” he says. | “You still conceive of them to the fullest,” he adds. “And you don’t let the idea of their life span, or lack of it, affect you.” His most recent foray — a sign of how Hermès is adapting to the times — has been into high-tech sneakers. The rest of the world’s athletic shoes, even if they retail for $500 or more, are made in Asian factories, but Hermès has maximized its Pantin workshop to meet the demand. “They are a completely different feat of engineering, like making a car,” he says. |
| He and Vanhee-Cybulski meet a few times a season to make sure their ideas are in sync. In recent years, with silhouettes, heel heights and hemlines so varied, they find easy harmony. “We are both very attuned to how each piece must stand on its own as an object,” says Vanhee-Cybulski, who came to Hermès in 2014, after four years as the design director of the Row. Her collections have been met with mixed receptions, often called out for being too mild or insufficiently novel, but during the late ’90s and aughts, when Martin Margiela and then Jean Paul Gaultier designed for the house (both have cited their time at Hermès as tranquil and collegial) — their clothes were lauded but were deemed too avant-garde for the brand. Now ready-to-wear and accessories account for 21 percent of the company’s total revenue, with Vanhee-Cybulski paying particular attention to outerwear, including a buttery yellow double-faced cashmere coat for this season. “We don’t spend any time at all looking to see what other designers are doing,” she says. “We feel what is in the air and in ourselves, but I really am not interested or impressed with fashion these days, and I am lucky I don’t have to be.” | He and Vanhee-Cybulski meet a few times a season to make sure their ideas are in sync. In recent years, with silhouettes, heel heights and hemlines so varied, they find easy harmony. “We are both very attuned to how each piece must stand on its own as an object,” says Vanhee-Cybulski, who came to Hermès in 2014, after four years as the design director of the Row. Her collections have been met with mixed receptions, often called out for being too mild or insufficiently novel, but during the late ’90s and aughts, when Martin Margiela and then Jean Paul Gaultier designed for the house (both have cited their time at Hermès as tranquil and collegial) — their clothes were lauded but were deemed too avant-garde for the brand. Now ready-to-wear and accessories account for 21 percent of the company’s total revenue, with Vanhee-Cybulski paying particular attention to outerwear, including a buttery yellow double-faced cashmere coat for this season. “We don’t spend any time at all looking to see what other designers are doing,” she says. “We feel what is in the air and in ourselves, but I really am not interested or impressed with fashion these days, and I am lucky I don’t have to be.” |
| Fashion, she knows, eats its young. That is its nature, or at least how it has evolved. Too often talent is not given time to develop; designers get ground down by the relentlessness of seasonal collections, the straining for currency, the pressure to cut costs, to move units — and then they are gone. Hermès, instead, has chosen the refined rhythm of timelessness — it is not concerned with being in fashion, preferring to remain outside of it. For this reason, it exists apart, in an antediluvian alternate universe where the objects come first and are made to last forever — a deliberate rejection of the culture of instant gratification. Hardy, contemplative and literary, frequently ponders the nature of freedom. Sitting at his long table in the shoe atelier, he turns over in his hand errant components he is considering for an upcoming collection — a sculptural steel heel that resembles a Jean Arp maquette, a Pilgrim-large buckle. “Freedom is what you tend to lose as you get older, as possibilities constrict,” he says. “But you know, I feel more free now than I did 15 years ago. That could never happen anywhere else. Everyone knows that. Not just inside here, but also in every other company. Here, when the thing is finished, because of those who touch it, it winds up more beautiful than you imagined at the beginning.” | Fashion, she knows, eats its young. That is its nature, or at least how it has evolved. Too often talent is not given time to develop; designers get ground down by the relentlessness of seasonal collections, the straining for currency, the pressure to cut costs, to move units — and then they are gone. Hermès, instead, has chosen the refined rhythm of timelessness — it is not concerned with being in fashion, preferring to remain outside of it. For this reason, it exists apart, in an antediluvian alternate universe where the objects come first and are made to last forever — a deliberate rejection of the culture of instant gratification. Hardy, contemplative and literary, frequently ponders the nature of freedom. Sitting at his long table in the shoe atelier, he turns over in his hand errant components he is considering for an upcoming collection — a sculptural steel heel that resembles a Jean Arp maquette, a Pilgrim-large buckle. “Freedom is what you tend to lose as you get older, as possibilities constrict,” he says. “But you know, I feel more free now than I did 15 years ago. That could never happen anywhere else. Everyone knows that. Not just inside here, but also in every other company. Here, when the thing is finished, because of those who touch it, it winds up more beautiful than you imagined at the beginning.” |
| Photo assistant: Martin Varet. Grooming: Hue Lan Van Duc and Géraldine Lemaire | Photo assistant: Martin Varet. Grooming: Hue Lan Van Duc and Géraldine Lemaire |