Hermès Archives - The Fashionable Truth

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Perfectly chic Christmas gifts from Quintessentially Asia magazine

Luxury is an experience and the best brands create beautiful products that become an intimate part of life’s narrative. Quintessentially Asia's...

In the End, Perspective

Louis Vuitton, by Nicolas Ghesquière, focused on a narrow silhouette It ended not with a bang, but with a building, and a farewell. Also some...

Arnault’s LVMH to Relinquish $7.5 Billion Hermes Stake

France’s richest man Bernard Arnault will relinquish most of his $7.5 billion holding in luxury-goods maker Hermes International (RMS) SCA,...

Hermes First-Half Profit Rises as Asian Revenue Advances

Customers wait in line to enter an Hermes store in Hong Kong Hermes International SCA (RMS) reiterated forecasts after reporting a 6.3 percent rise...

The Making Of | Christophe Lemaire’s Sculptural Leather Bags for Hermès

Christophe Lemaire’s fall:winter 2014 collection featured two styles of seamless, hard bags Even two-plus decades into his...

A history of defacing the Hermes Birkin bag

Jane Birkin with the Hermes bag named in her honour, decorated with stickers Forget private jets and magnums of Cristal, the Hermès Birkin is...

Pierre Hardy on the set of TV show “Ce Soir ou Jamais”

Classy Hermès put humor at the heart of their new designs

Hermès has developed an enviable reputation for raising the bar on luxury, taking refinement and good taste to ever-higher levels, but it’s...

Hermès digs deep into its archive to saddle up a new bag

The Hermès brand was established by Thierry Hermès in 1837 on the Grands Boulevards in Paris. It was conceived as a superior...

Hermès, having a ball

To celebrate the opening of its new Beverly Hills store in September Hermès unveiled its hand-stitched basket basketball, which retails at...

That tradition was shaken last year when LVMH, the world’s largest agglomeration of luxury marques (including Louis Vuitton), acquired a 22 per cent stake in Hermès. To secure Hermès from LVMH, 50 relations from three branches of the family recently met to establish a watertight holding company that owns 51 per cent of Hermès, and which cannot be sold for 20 years. “Although we’re confident,” Pierre-Alexis says, “we will remain paranoid until the end. It was really a Nietzschean moment, it didn’t destroy us, so it made us stronger. When I pass this company on to the seventh generation, then I will believe I’ve done my job.” “No,’ Pierre-Alexis says baldly. ‘I don’t. It’s not my bag.” A few days later, I visit an Hermès facility on the outskirts of Paris. Once my passport is politely confiscated, and I am firmly admonished against photography, the experience proves cheery. The vision of Hermès at the Leather Forever exhibition did not include the snaps of David Beckham or Daphne Guinness (toting an Hermès) that are Blu-Tacked to Parisian workers’ desks, or the laughter-punctured murmur of chatter, machine-whirr and banging (during ‘perlage’, the attachment of hardware to bags) that fills the room. The craftsmen and women I meet (all quite young) appear both genuinely charming and charmed by their jobs. They say the Plume – the company’s oldest bag design – is the most difficult to make, and that the average time it takes to make a bag is two and a half weeks. A recently hired 17-year-old named Dimitri, wearing piercings and jeans, has just finished his first Kelly, coloured a glowing light blue, and made inside out to reduce the appearance of stitching on the exterior. In front of us, with infinite slowness and the help of a tiny iron to reduce stress to its calfskin, he turns the bag outside in again – and beams like a new father when the delivery is flawlessly complete. Another worker, a cool, slightly older chap named Julien Serange, says, “We don’t feel like machines here, because we do everything from the beginning to the end, from A to Z. It is a pleasure to do this.” Even if you’ve no intention of spending thousands of pounds on a handbag, it is certainly interesting to see how the world’s finest are made. And the determination of the people who run it is impressive too. Pierre-Alexis may be a little prickly, but who wouldn’t be in the face of an unwanted outside attempt to wrest control of a company built, and loved, by six generations? As he says, “As long as the Hermès house remains a family business – and as long as we’re alive – I can tell you that we will be here to remind people that there are human beings behind an object. An object is a tenet of culture, and it has a soul. If we forget that, we die.”

In China Hermès is searching for success with a powerful set of tools

THE LUXURY COMPANY HERMèS HAS BEEN CREATING LEATHER ACCESSORIES FOR 175 YEARS, FROM ITS BIRTH AS A SADDLEMAKER TO...

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