And the next direction in design evolution? Art, of course. At the 2006 Shanghai Art Fair, Dumas spotted the Chinese painter Ding Ye, who he thought was “made for textile.” After inviting him to Paris to “explain the tradition” and waiting six months without a word, a canvas arrived. “And it’s there behind me.” Suddenly I notice a painting on the wall, a navy ground with a bright geometry of squares that are not quite even or remotely random. Dumas tosses a scarf onto the table. “And there’s the result.”

Now, I like a nice silk square; I’ve had protracted periods of scarf usage. But not until this moment do I truly get the Hermès phenomenon. This swathe of fat silk is a dead ringer for Ding’s canvas, only it’s come alive. The intense deep blue seems layered with light, the rows of square shapes in crimson, fuschia, yellow, green rippling; it’s fluid. I fondle it. “That’s for fall-winter ’09,” says Dumas. “Rhythm of China is the flavor of the collection.”

For Dumas, this collaboration, exciting as it is, pales in comparison with the one that for him represents the coming together of many strands of history—cultural, personal, and corporate. He has named this venture Hermès Editeur—Hermès the Publisher—and it’s the company’s first-ever limited-edition project. The inaugural edition is Hommage au Carré: precise silk reproductions of six paintings by the Bauhaus alum Josef Albers, from his series of paintings Hommage to the Square, executed between 1950 and 1964. “It’s my foundation stone,” says Dumas. “I wanted to develop a small collection within a collection to reaffirm our founding values and to launch it with an artist whose life and art were exactly in line with those values. I’ve always had a passion for Albers. I’m intrigued by the way he worked with the square shape and with color. I never found him cold. And he was a great teacher—always helping you understand the phenomenon of color. Color is emotionally fulfilling. Color brings us back to basic evolution, to the experience of life. And color makes us vibrate.”

An Albers square painting may seem a no-brainer for a scarf—but it’s not. Evidently, translating him into silk has been the single most challenging technical feat in the history of the scarf. The colors—from one of the world’s foremost theoreticians, manipulators, and, yes, worshipers of color—are required to sing arias. The fields must remain discrete. In a technique called bord à bord (edge to edge), each pure color touches the next but without overlapping, and without the serti—the customary edging technique that leaves a lip of the bare base fabric. This scarf’s radical simplicity displays every minute flaw. “You can’t even have one piece of dust on the screen because you’d see it right away,” Dumas explains. “We spend more time printing these than the rest of the scarf collection put together.”

Although this design has presented a massive challenge for the printers in Lyon, it still seems to fall into the “duh, of course” category, especially when you learn what the Bauhaus means to the Hermès artistic director. “The Bauhaus was based on respect for the craft, on valuing creativity,” he explains. “A civilization believing in talent—that was the vision of Bauhaus, and it was destroyed by the Nazi regime. That says a lot. When the Nazis closed down the Bauhaus it gave them the excuse to do what they did next.”

Does a tourist splurging on a stack of flat orange boxes connect her new neckwear with the fight for freedom, creativity, and justice? Probably not. And yet I join Dumas in believing there’s a mysterious power in an object made with intensity, skill, and spirit. It is, I think, impossible to produce a piece at the level of the Hermès artisans with bad intentions. That amount of concentration—and hand-eye coordination—leaves no room for evil thoughts.

Given his passionate connection to the project, it’s surprising to learn that Dumas met Nicholas Weber, director of the Albers Foundation, quite by chance. Weber was instantly on board, though. “Nick said he’d love to do this,” says Dumas. “So we spent two days—it was bliss—looking in the Albers archives. This is not a usual collection. Deciding to publish his work on silk, it’s not banal.” (Nor would it have been entirely foreign to Albers, whose wife, Anni, was a textile artist.) “He is not there,” continues Dumas, “but I know I’ll talk for him. I really feel we’re having a conversation. It’s very moving.”