Get an up-close look at Hermès craftsmanship,
There is nothing quite like opening something from Hermès. Even if all that’s inside is a tube of toothpaste, and the trademark orange wrapper and chocolate brown ribbon have been used before (which is why I keep every stitch of Hermès packaging I have ever come into contact with and reuse them at every opportunity).
But, really, there is literally nothing like Hermès anymore.
No other luxury brand in the world has backed up its mystique with a promise of quality so meticulous and time-honoured that the house has its own language — words like ennobler (for finishing a silk scarf, or carré) and feutrer (for rubbing a skin with felt to develop a patina) — for its own tradition of craftsmanship.
Still largely family-owned and produced in France according to rigorous standards developed since its founding as a saddlery in 1837, Hermès is the real deal.
Such a rarity is it in this globalized era of quick and dirty manufacturing that its artisanal practices practically belong in a museum.
That will, in fact, be the case this week at the Design Exchange, where the Festival des Métiers, following a run in London’s Saatchi gallery, will feature a dozen real, live Hermès craftspeople actually engraving the house’s complicated prints, silkscreening a carré, working on watches, and making both a Jypsière bag and a Kelly bag.
“In 1963, my father went to Paris and my mother asked him to bring her back a Kelly,” says Hermès Canada president Jennifer Carter. “All they had even then was a small crocodile one, which he bought for something like $800. More than 25 years later, in 1990, when I started at Hermès, my mother gave me that same bag. The next year, I was over in Paris at a dinner at the Faubourg sitting next to (then CEO) Jean-Louis Dumas. Of course, I had worn my mother’s Kelly. Seeing the bag, Dumas asks me if he can take a look inside. After some time peering in my handbag, inspecting the lining, he asks me to follow him upstairs. We take the elevator to a workroom where an older gentleman was working at a large table with another younger man. Says Dumas, ‘I’d like you to meet Jean-Luc. He is the man who made your mother’s bag. And this is his son, who is now learning the trade.’ ” Craft, simply put, is the brand’s raison d’être. Each Hermès scarf has a hand-rolled hem and after some thirty hours of working on a leather bag, the artisan who has completed it will leave his or her signature. “The only thing that has sped up with globalization is that we can export faster,” says Carter. Which explains the notorious wait list, particularly for a coveted Birkin. What is particular to Hermès is the emotional buy-in that only comes with something that is produced with such care and attention to detail. “I know people who want to be buried in their Hermès blanket,” says Carter.
“After all the work in making it, once that object leaves Hermès, it takes on a life of its own.
You get attached to INTEND and that attachment is like a romance,” says Carter, who plans to wear her mother’s Kelly to the Design Exchange opening.
The Festival des Métiers runs from Oct. 2 to 6, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Unlike an investment in a Birkin, the opportunity to observe this rare demonstration of the finest artisanship will be free to passersby. Karen von Hahn is a Toronto-based writer, trend observer and style commentator. Contact her at kvh@karenvonhahn.com.