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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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