by Dana Thomas
When I visited, one of the craftsmen was working with a ruby red crocodile skin, another with pine green. The men stand on spongy rubber mats—they’re on their feet all day—and lay the skin, which still retains the shape of the animal, across big white tables. Under natural light streaming through skylights, they inspect the skin and circle the defects with a white marker. All skins have defects that must be cut out. Cows have scars from wounds or mosquito bites that can’t be seen until the hide is tanned. “On crocodile and on light, bright colors you see everything,” one of the artisans explained. The piece he was working on had too many marks to use for the body or flap of a handbag. Perhaps, he said, they’d use it for a gusset.
The skin men cut all the forms for each bag and put the pieces into a plastic tray, along with zippers, locks, hardware, lining, leather string for piping—everything that is required to make the entire bag. The tray is handed off to a craftsperson who will build the bag from beginning to end. Each artisan works on three or four bags at a time—same model, same size, same material. One was working on a mini Kelly in black crocodile with a diamond clasp. Diamonds are always set in white gold and come with a certificate verifying the weight of the gold and the stones. In 2004, the special-orders atelier made a ruby red Birkin with diamonds on the fittings for the Hermès store in Honolulu that sold for $90,000.
Most Hermès bags are built from the inside out. The first thing the artisan uses is a griffe, a handmade metal tool that looks like an Afro comb with very pointy tips. The griffe, which comes in several sizes, is pushed lightly along the edges of the leather to mark perfectly and evenly where the artisan will sew the seam by hand. Only the zipper and the inside pocket are sewn by machine. The artisan inserts a stiff piece of cowhide between the outer skin and the lining to give the bag strength and rigidity. Everything on the bag except the zipper is made of leather (unless of course it is a raffia or canvas bag). There are no unseen plastic reinforcements, no hidden canvas or plastic linings.
The Kelly comes in two styles: sellier, which means the seams are on the outside, and retourner, which means the seams are on the inside. The Birkin is only available retourner. The edges of retourner bags have piping, usually in the same color as the rest of the bag. The piping is made by wrapping a piece of leather cord with the skin, held together with a bit of glue. When it is all sewn together, there are eight layers of leather: the outer skin, the cowhide, and the lining on each side, plus the two edges of the piping. On the Kelly, the flap is a continuation of the back of bag. On the Birkin, it is sewn on.
The artisans sew all the leather seams by hand with a classic saddle stitch. The artisan takes two needles and one very long piece of thread, long enough to sew together all the pieces so that there are no knots on the bag. The linen thread, which comes from France, is break-resistant and doesn’t burn when pulled through the leather. It is waxed with beeswax to make it strong, waterproof, and smoothe. It always matches the leather, except when the skin is gold or natural, in which case white thread is used. The artisan holds the leather together with a long wooden clamp, leaving his two hands free. He pierces each griffe mark with an awl, making a hole through the several pieces of leather; sticks one needle through in one direction and the other through the other direction; tugs till the stitch is tight; and moves on to the next. The beginning and end of each seam has three double stitches so it doesn’t come apart. Once sewing is completed, the seams are tapped flat with a plastic hammer and the edges are shaved, sanded, and polished with wax until they are smooth and appear to be one single piece of leather. The handle is comprised of six pieces of leather and is shaped on the artisan’s thigh; each one takes about three and a half hours to make. “If the handle is not perfect,” said one artisan, “the bag is not perfect.”
When the inside and outside of the bag are complete, the artisan puts it all together and attaches the hardware. The hardware on most handbags today is attached with screws, but, as I was told by an Hermès artisan, screws come unscrewed. Hermès has a special method for attaching its hardware called pearling. The artisan puts the clasp on the front of the leather and a metal backing on the backside, sticks a nail from the back to the front through each corner hole, and clips off the length of the nail, leaving a tiny bit. He takes a special tool that looks like an awl but with a slight concave tip and taps the bit of nail gently in a circle until it is as round as a tiny pearl. Each piece of hardware has four pearls—one on each corner—and each is exactly the same shape. The pearls hold the two pieces of metal together forever. The hardware is then covered with clear plastic film to protect it from getting scratched. The artisan turns the bag right side out and irons it into shape. Ever-delicate crocodile is ironed scale by scale. The artisan runs a skinny hot iron between seams to clean as well as define and straighten the edge.
When the bag is finished, a supervisor inspects it to see if the stitching is balanced, the pearls are well done, the lock works, the shape is perfect, and the surface is unblemished. If the supervisor approves the bag, it is marked with a stamp that identifies the artisan, the year, and the workshop. On the Kelly, the stamp is on the leather buckle. The bag is placed in the house’s signature orange felt bag and sent to the logistics department, about fifteen minutes away in the suburb of Bobigny, to be inspected again. If it passes, it is wrapped in tissue paper, boxed, and sent to the store. Hermès wouldn’t tell me what they do with bags that don’t pass inspection.
IN 2007, Hermès had 257 stores around the world, in cosmopolitan shopping districts, suburban shopping malls, five-star hotels, and international airports. But the loveliest by far is the original flagship at 24, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, just steps off the Place de la Concorde in Paris. The two-floor store in the six-story company headquarters is a throwback to the late-nineteenth-century emporium: heavy black iron-and-glass doors, well-worn mosaic tile floors, highly polished oak sales counters topped with glass display cases, deco domed lighting. On the walls hang beautiful eighteenth-and nineteenth-century equestrian prints and paintings. Among them is a stunning 1727 portrait of King Louis XV astride a high-stepping steed, one of three by Jean-Baptiste van Loo and Charles Parrocel. Another hangs in the Louvre.
Walk in any time of day and the place is humming with activity. Slim chic saleswomen dramatically unfurl silk scarf after silk scarf for clusters of Japanese shoppers and elegant Parisiennes. Tailors take measurements for made-to-order suits, and millinery experts size up chapeaus to be worn at the next big wedding or horse race. On the mezzanine, jewelers fit watches or help select the perfect pair of cuff links. In the back, salesmen in the saddle department show off bridles, hacking jackets, and saddles, which, like Hermès handbags, are made to order and by hand. Hermès has made more than forty-three thousand saddles since its founding in 1837. To be measured for one, customers make their way up the back stairs to the saddle atelier, where they straddle a leather sawhorse—just as clients have for more than a century—as one of the company’s eight saddlemakers, dressed in a worn cowhide apron, takes out his tape measure and gets to work. That, in a snapshot, is what sets Hermès apart from its competitors in the luxury business. As its 2004 fall ad campaign, shot by the late Richard Avedon, declared: “Nothing changes, but everything changes.”
In the center of the store is another staircase that leads to what Jean-Louis Dumas describes as the “soul of Hermès”: the former office of Dumas’s grandfather Émile-Maurice Hermès, which today serves as the Hermès museum. Open by appointment and curated by Hermès’s director of cultural heritage, Menehould de Bazelaire, the two-room museum is a veritable time machine that whisks visitors back a century to an epoch when one still traveled by horse, and life for the rich and noble was extremely refined. On the oak-paneled walls hang equestrian prints, carriage lanterns, silver spurs, leather crops, and harnesses, some decorated with royal coats of arms. Scattered about are hand-tooled saddles, trunks, toiletry cases, and a children’s carriage from the reign of Napoleon I. Today the mus
eum serves as an inspiration for the company’s designers. For example, the gold-painted waves on a Japanese saddle were reproduced recently on a silk scarf.
De Bazelaire is a tall, thin, handsome woman—she reminded me a bit of Katharine Hepburn—and an educator at heart. She began her career teaching Greek and Latin at the Lycée Française in New York. In the 1980s, she returned to Paris to become an archivist and was soon hired by Hermès to replace its retiring part-time museum curator. Today, overseeing a staff of fifteen, she is in charge of the house’s archives, documentation, conservation, and museum. On a freezing January night in 2006, she welcomed me into the museum and told me all there is to know about the house of Hermès.
Thierry Hermès was born to Dietrich Hermès, an auberge owner, and his wife, Agnes, in Krefeld, a town on the left bank of the Rhine not far from Cologne. The region was French at the time, so Thierry, the youngest of six children, had French papers. The family was Protestant, a minority that had long been persecuted in Catholic Europe. This persecution, Jean-Louis Dumas has said, contributed to Hermès’s success in the luxury business: by keeping to themselves, the family learned to succeed as merchants.
Krefeld was on the road to Russia, and as a child, de Bazelaire explained, Thierry watched as Napoleon’s troops passed by full of pride on their way to Moscow and returned wounded and defeated. His oldest brother, Henri, a soldier in Napoleon’s army, was killed during battle in Spain in 1813, and his parents and his four other siblings died of disease, leaving Thierry orphaned at fifteen. In 1821, he walked with a Dutch friend to Paris. Thierry settled in Normandy, France’s horse country, to learn the harness-making trade, married, and had three children. In 1837, he opened a harness workshop near the Madeleine in Paris. Five years later he moved around the corner to the boulevard des Capucines. Today it is the site of the Olympia theater. “It was a very cosmopolitan quarter,” de Bazelaire told me. “The cafés were filled with royals, courtesans, and demimondaines, like Marie Duplessis, the woman who inspired Alexandre Dumas’s Camille, and later Verdi’s La Traviata. She promenaded down Paris’s grands boulevards in a cabriolet carriage with Hermès harnesses.”
In 1859, Thierry retired to Normandy and turned the company over to his second son, Charles-Émile. By then, Charles-Émile had married and had four children, including Émile-Maurice. The horse transportation business was booming: in the 1860s, there were ninety thousand horses in the streets of Paris. Charles-Émile invented harnesses that protected both horses and passengers, such as on that stopped horses from bolting. In 1880, he moved the business to a pretty two-story building at 24, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, near the Champs-Élysées and the Bois de Boulogne, which, de Bazelaire noted, “was the noble horse country back then.” The shop was on the ground floor, the ateliers on the first floor, and the oldest son, Adolphe, lived in the converted attic, where the museum is now located. Charles-Émile expanded the business by adding ateliers to produce saddles and jockey racing silks. In 1902, a sports newspaper writer described Hermès as “the great horse bazaar in Paris.”
The dawning of the twentieth century was, as for Louis Vuitton, the turning point for Hermès. In 1902, Charles-Émile’s sons, Émile-Maurice and Adolphe, took over the business. Émile-Maurice spoke English very well and was a globetrotter long before it was fashionable. Following a trip to Argentina, where he saw gauchos carrying their saddles in big satchels, he came up with Hermès’s haut à courroies saddlebag. He traveled to Russia and secured an order to produce harnesses and saddles for Czar Nicholas II. During World War I, he went to the United States and Canada and saw a new invention called the zipper. He secured the patent for Europe from 1922 to 1924 and integrated it into Hermès designs, such as the sac pour l’auto, known now as the Bolide. He remodeled the building, adding four floors, converting the old attic into his office, and turning the southwest corner of the ground floor into a big display window.
With the help of friends Louis Renault (the cofounder of automaker Renault), and Ettore Bugatti (the revolutionary Italian carmaker), Émile-Maurice introduced products for the automobile such as trunks that fit on the back of a Bugatti and leather wallets for maps. He enlisted contemporary artists Jean-Michel Frank, the Giacometti brothers, and Sonia Delaunay to design products; developed new lines such as couture and belts; and expanded the retail network to such fashionable French holiday resorts as Deauville, Biarritz, and Cannes. The Cannes boutique makes an appearance in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night when Nicole Diver buys “two chamois leather jackets of kingfisher blue and burning bush from Hermès.”
In the late 1930s, Émile-Maurice bought Mi Colline, a villa in the hills above Cannes, not far from the Croisette shop. During the Nazi Occupation of Paris, most of the family fled to Mi Colline. The Hermès store on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré shut down for four days and then reopened to keep the employees working and receiving wages, however small. Émile-Maurice’s son-in-law Jean Guerrand took over the store and distributed potato soup to the workers because, de Bazelaire said, “everyone was starving.” As in many stores that remained open during the Occupation, there were often signs in the Hermès windows reading, “Nothing for Sale,” due to shortages not only of materials but also the will to sell to Nazis. General Hermann Göring ordered a big picnic trunk from Hermès, but there was no leather and no motivation, and it was never produced. Paper, cardboard, and other sorts of packaging were scarce as well; the only color available was vibrant orange. Hermès used it for boxes and bags. Almost overnight, it became the house’s signature color.
In 1945, Émile-Maurice adopted the company logo based on a drawing by nineteenth-century artist Alfred de Dreux of a groom standing before a horse and open carriage. The picture still hangs behind his desk in the museum. A few years later, he introduced silk neckties and the house’s first scent, Eau d’Hermès, which is still a staple at the house. In 1951, the eighty-year-old Émile-Maurice died of a stroke and his son-in-law Robert Dumas took over. With the help of Guerrand, Dumas focused on the burgeoning jet set. It was Dumas who decided to rename the haut à courroies the Kelly after Princess Grace of Monaco—formerly Grace Kelly—was photographed carrying it to conceal her pregnancy. Half a century later, the Kelly remains one of the most popular items at Hermès.
Most important, though, Robert Dumas groomed his son Jean-Louis to lead the company into the twenty-first century. Jean-Louis Dumas is what the French call un grand monsieur: well educated, distinguished, and charming. As he likes to point out, “Oscar Wilde said elegance is power.” By the time he was born—in 1938, the fourth of Robert’s six children—the Dumas family not only sold leather goods to the right sort, they were the right sort. He attended Lycée Franklin, a preppy Jesuit school in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, and went on to France’s prestigious Paris Institute of Political Science in the Quartier Latin, where he took degrees in politics and economics. Like his grandfather Émile-Maurice, he traveled extensively. In the early 1960s, he and his Greek-born wife, Rena, climbed into a beat-up Citröen and drove down the Silk Road to India. Dumas has said that the trip opened his eyes to vast gulf between rich and poor and gave him a sense of spiritualism that he would use later to guide the company.
In 1963, Jean-Louis was sent by his father to work as an assistant buyer for Bloomingdale’s in New York to learn the fashion retail trade. A year later, he joined the family business as a consultant, “an ideas man,” de Bazelaire explained. The 1970s were a quiet, rambling time for Hermès. Luxury was next to dead. The oil crisis, the economic recession, and high unemployment dried up spending. To make matters worse, Robert Dumas didn’t push the company like his father-in-law, Émile-Maurice, had. “Robert was very discreet, from a generation where you didn’t hawk your wares, you didn’t sell per se,” de Bazelaire explained. Instead, you waited for the good, regular customers to come in and buy. And they didn’t. Sales were so slow one year that the company was forced to shut down the ateliers for two weeks.
In 1976, t
he company received an unexpected boost from fashion photographer Helmut Newton, known as the “King of Kink” for his sexually powerful pictures. Newton adored Hermès. He found the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré store to be “the most expensive and luxurious sex shop in the world,” he wrote in his autobiography. “In its glass cases there were displayed great collections of spurs, whips, leather ware, and saddles. The salesladies were dressed like strict teachers, in wraparound gray flannel skirts, blouses closed to the neck, and a brooch in the shape of a riding crop pinned to their bosoms.” Newton paid homage to Hermès by shooting a portfolio featuring its products at the Hôtel Raphael in Paris for Vogue. And what pictures they were. The most famous is of a model on all fours on a bed, with a saddle on her back, while dressed in tight jodhpurs, shiny black leather riding boots with silver spurs, and a black lace scoop bra. “After seeing the Vogue pages, [Robert Dumas] succumbed to a malaise,” Newton recalled. “Happily,” Newton added, “he recovered.”
When Robert Dumas died two years later from illness, the board unanimously elected Jean-Louis as chairman. With the help of his cousins Patrick Guerrand and Bertrand Puech, Dumas got the company back in shape. He reinvigorated the silk scarf business by hiring artists to make dazzling new designs and by having salesclerks show customers creative new ways to wear them: as a belt, as a halter top, or simply tied to a handbag for a splash of color. He hired an outside firm to do ad campaigns—a first for the house—and expanded the press office, which at the time had one person for the entire company. (By 2006, there were sixteen press attachés in Paris alone.) In 1980, he hired nineteen-year-old designer Eric Bergère just out of fashion school to liven up the staid women’s wear line. And then he decided to revitalize the handbag division.