The knot-ical feel pof luxury
When it comes to luxury retail brands, Hermès will be one of the names at the very pinnacle.
The brand was founded in 1837 by Thierry Hermès, then specializing in saddlery, bridles and harnesses. The “Duc carriage with horse,” which originated in the ‘50s as the brand’s globally recognized logo, pays tribute to the origins of this fabled brand.
Now boasting of 14 product divisions — leather, scarves, ties, menswear, women’s fashion, watches, stationery, perfume, gloves, enamel, decorative arts, tableware, footwear and jewelry — the name of Hermès is synonymous with high quality and luxury, where function, design and impeccable taste converge. To its credit, Hermès has never licensed its products, preferring to maintain strict control over the production and inventory of any of the merchandise that carries its name. This has helped the brand in the fight against counterfeiting, which, while still a problem, does not happen on the levels of other luxury brands — or are easier to detect.
A recent event celebrating La Maison des Carrés Hermès was a showcase of the richness and diversity of the scarves product division: the square scarves, the twilly, the maxi-twilly, bow ties, stoles, pocket squares and so on. Perhaps it’s because we’re a tropical country, but the event brought home how the typical Filipino Hermès buyer still has so much to discover and explore when it comes to the use of scarves.
The silk scarves of Hermès are small works of art and as I surveyed the crowd and recalled how I would often see Filipinos abroad, I realized that more often than not, scarves are worn as simple mufflers (wrapped around the neck with a knot, if at all, in the back), or as shoulder dusters (knotted in the front, below the collarbone). And I remembered my late mother, who, as far back as the late 1970s, would make the comment about how, while functioning to protect your neck and fight the cold, scarves are essentially “toys” of fashion, and one had to invest the time to learn how to “play” with them.
The Wrap and Tie, the Boho Wrap, the Rosette Knot, the Ascot Wrap, the Necklace Knots, the Cowboy Bolo Tie, the Bisous Bow Tie, the Layered Knot, the various permutations of the head scarf — these were just some of the ways my late mother would “play.” And this was before the days of the Internet; so I know my sisters were left having to practice on their own after my mom would demonstrate the various knots. Today, we can count ourselves lucky that there are webpages devoted to scarves and how to tie the different knots. Hermès even has an app one can download, and view instructional videos on scarf-tying. But ultimately, it does take practice and investing the time to perfect the different knots and options. Time well spent as the worlds of possibility and versatility open up — and let’s face it, would be such a shame if after investing in these wonderful scarves, we’re stuck using them in only one or two ways.
Was watching the faces of the women who attended the event, and it was evident that as the models were demonstrating four to five versions of how to use the scarves, they had a rapt audience. I know that from somewhere up there, my mom, who brought me to my first Hermès store (on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré), was telling me, “Told you so.”
From Europa, with love
While one of the authors of these three novels is American (Prose) and one of Japanese descent ( Ishiguro), the subject matter of the three books celebrates Europe in diverse ways. From Paris in 1932, to medieval Britain and back to the 1940s but in the Nazioccupied Czech Republic, these stories are incandescent.
Lovers at the Chameleon Club,
Paris 1932 by Francine Prose (available at National Book Store) Inspired by the famous Brassaï photograph of a lesbian couple in a Paris nightclub in 1932, Francine Prose creates an engrossing work of historical fiction. From memoirs, letters, journals written by the various characters who made up this Parisian demimonde, we piece together a portrait of Lou Villars, the butch woman in the photo. Budding Olympic athlete, entertainer, race car driver then mechanic, and infamous Gestapo collaborator and informer during the Occupation, Lou may have been a misunderstood, reprehensible person, but never less than fascinating. Filled with wit, satire and irony, this is Prose at her best, taking us intimately into a mood and time when most of Europe had suspended morality and when atrocities and abominations were everyday occurrences.
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro (available at Fully Booked) Ishiguro pulls out the proverbial rabbit from the hat with this new novel that is set in medieval Britain, a time when King Arthur has just passed away and the legacy of the Round Table is still a potent force. Our main protagonists are an elderly Briton couple, Axl and Beatrice, a Saxon warrior and his ward, and Sir Gawain, now an old, rickety knight. It is a world where sudden death, ogres and dragons are matterof-fact occurrences. I liken this to Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day as duty and service are recurring themes: of husband to wife and vice versa, of warrior to King and mission, of knight to a code of conduct and legacy. The notions of memory and its absence, of a sense of time and place, are just some of the rewards of reading this book.
HHhH by Laurent Binet (available at Fully Booked) With this novel, Binet gives a new twist to the genre historical fiction. While ostensibly about the assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich in Prague during World War II, this book is also about Binet obsessing about this historical sidebar, how a Czech and Slovak were behind the attempt, and the dire repercussions that followed. How the book comes to life is never far from the prose that Binet gives us a very unique perspective to how this kind of fiction is created — meditations on history, the liberties taken in the genre, and writing itself. The title is an acronym for saying in German that “Himmler’s brain is Heydrich,” and what this intricately written novel has is Binet as author playing a role in how this story is brought to us. Fascinating history colored by the writer himself.