De Bazelaire plucks pieces from mirrored cases with white cotton gloves but doesn’t mind in the least if I touch—in fact, she encourages it. “Feel how smooth that is,” she says. “Imagine how many hands have touched it.” She is a family historian as much as a custodian. “For Emile, the more he collected, the more he could innovate,” she explains. “For him, beauty was always something to do with intelligence and enchantment of your senses. All this you know when you spend time with these objects. It’s a strong heritage for Hermès. Something happens when they come here.”

Dumas knew his great-grandfather Emile-Maurice only through his eloquent collection, but his grandfather Robert (Emile’s son-in-law) was an influential character in his childhood. “Every morning he would present himself at the workshops,” Dumas remembers, standing up to imitate his grandfather’s formal, hat-doffing bow. Dumas used to visit him in his office—now the store’s glove area—where grandpère designed scarves, playing around with shapes and colors. “He taught me a few design tricks,” Dumas says. “More than tricks—principles. He said the best way to judge a pattern was to stand up and look from above.” Dumas stands up again to view an imaginary scarf on the floor. By the time his grandfather died, the 12-year-old Dumas had fully absorbed his interest in pattern, color, and design and continued to bounce ideas around, confident in his opinions even as a teen. “I do remember talking with my father about Hermès scarves a lot,” he says. “I made him feel a bit upset once when I said a scarf was ugly.” He shrugs. “I didn’t feel guilty about it.”

These artistic inclinations led Dumas across the Atlantic, to Providence, Rhode Island, to study visual arts at Brown. “I was totally clueless,” he says. “That’s why I went to Brown. It helped me to meet Pierre-Alexis.” It soon dawned on him that the Pierre-Alexis he’d met was cut out for the family business after all. He entered the internship program at Ratti, the Italian luxury-textiles group, learning printing, coloration process, and design. (One of the patterns in his portfolio, a Neapolitan fan design, was picked up by Versace. As far as he knows, the company still has it and would probably be astonished to know the artistic director of Hermès was behind it.) In 2002, after spending five years at Hermès China and four as director of Hermès England, he came home to Paris to work with his father as deputy artistic director before taking the reins in spring 2006, overseeing everything textile.

No matter how its ready-to-wear lines may flourish, no matter how many legions of gentlemen fetishize the ties, the ultimate Hermès textile is the scarf. The company was 100 years old before Emile-Maurice thought to spin off the racing-silks side of the business into this froufrou item, corralling the peerless craftsmen of Lyon to produce a carré de soie, a square of Chinese silk so distinctive, thick, cheeky, and lush that it started a cult—a culture—that still thrives 70 years on. The message an Hermès scarf transmits has varied over the decades—one minute evoking Queen Elizabeth walking the corgis at Balmoral, the next conjuring the Deneuve of Belle de Jour—but it never ceases to signify something. And you can fine-tune the signal because of the vast proliferation of patterns created since Emile-Maurice’s first scarf—Jeux des Omnibus, a design of horse-drawn carriages in concentric circles copied from an 1830s piece in his embryonic museum.

Dumas took the helm at an interesting moment. “By the end of the ’90s, it was all minimalist,” he says. “Everyone had been saturated with pattern. But I knew color and illustration would come back. These cycles last 5 to 10 years. I began working with illustrators. I appointed [young fashion designer] Bali Barret. I spent a lot of time looking at our—I call it our national treasure, our book of over 2,000 patterns. It’s very complex. It’s like a Rubik’s Cube—you can approach it from many, many angles: color, theme….”