Keeping the Faith

Photo by Estelle Hanania

Pierre-Alexis Dumas contemplates the artistic future of Hermès.

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Unlike its 8th Arrondissement neighbors, which endure regular droughts, this flagship hosts a continuous stream of people poring over vitrines of silks, discussing details of their Birkin-to-be, picking out a cult étrivière bracelet. While surrounding stores blast songs (“Another fading beauty of the Sunset Strip” was a recent, perhaps ill-advised lyric heard at Givenchy), this one has only ambient bustle as its soundtrack. Also, it has two art installations and a saddlery department. It’s as distinct from its peers as its iconic orange boxes are distinctive—and its differences go deep. While (nearly) all of its main competitors— including Louis Vuitton, Chloé, and the Gucci group—are owned by the luxury conglomerates LVMH, Richemont, and PPR, Hermès, founded as a saddlery and harness maker by Thierry Hermès in 1837, remains in the family. When the dynamic figurehead Jean-Louis Dumas retired two years ago (having succeeded his father, Robert Dumas, in 1978), it reached the sixth generation. Nowadays, while (unrelated) CEO Patrick Thomas takes care of its business, co–artistic directors—and cousins—Pierre-Alexis Dumas and Pascale Mussard nurture its soul.

Can a luxury brand that’s lusted after by the world’s social climbers really have a soul? After roaming the extensive private parts of 24, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, learning about Pierre-Alexis Dumas’s current passion of printing Art on scarves, taking in the haunting private museum of handmade, largely equestrian-themed objets, and generally breathing the Hermès air, I honestly believe that it can. These items, to which only the most privileged tranche of humanity can aspire, are not fashionable fripperies. They represent a grand heritage; they seem to embody a vital facet of culture.

Pierre-Alexis Dumas certainly thinks so. I meet him in his clean, white, glass-walled office in an extension at 26, Faubourg that has just been completed by architect Rena Dumas (a.k.a. Mom). Dumas fils is a philosopher of the artisan tradition into which he was born. He says things like: “We are the keepers of culture” and “We are the holders of a great tradition.” He does not mean red-carpet culture, or the tradition of gifting celebrities. “I call what we do quality manufacturing—not luxury,” he tells me. “We’re not expensive, because to be expensive you have to be vain. We’re costly. We have a devastating passion for detail. Our fight for quality is forcing us to strive for a better world.” This does not come off as pretentious, partly because there’s a small stuffed leopard on a shelf poised to pounce on his head and partly because Dumas— dapper, handsome, soft-spoken—is utterly sincere.

Joining the family firm was not a given; Hermès descendants need to make a conscious decision and to prove their worth before they’re let anywhere near the cogs and wheels. Dumas’s teenage years saw a great expansion of the company, which, he says, wasn’t discussed at home beyond the usual “How was your day?” chatter—though his father Jean-Louis’s office stories, full of exotic foreigners and tempting travels, were unusually exciting. Even if the family firm wasn’t examined over dinner, the very walls were steeped in, so to speak, Hermessence (the name bestowed on a line of unisex Hermès scents in 2004). Successive generations of offspring had the run of the store, the workshops, the design ateliers, and especially, the phantasmagoria of playthings crowding great-grandfather Emile-Maurice Hermès’s offices, now the museum.

This oak-paneled suite on the third floor isn’t really a museum. It’s open only by invitation, a sensuous experience of Hermès DNA meant to inspire collaborators, designers, family, and guests—among them Jean Paul Gaultier, creative director of Hermès’s ready-towear line; house perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena; and such late friends-of-Hermès as Grace Kelly and the Duchess of Windsor. As the delightful, elegant, poetic curator (for 22 years) Ménéhould de Bazelaire puts it: “It’s a homemade collection—it’s very free.” The oldest piece dates from 1000 B.C., yet there are no labels. The organizing principle is if it’s handmade, exceptional, and horsey, Emile-Maurice was attracted to it. (Same goes for his descendants, who continue to add to the collection.) A filigree bucket turns out to be an 11th-century piece of German armor, a helmet for a horse. There are wooden travel cases customized with dozens of silver boxes for every purpose, slotted inside with jigsaw precision. One of Dumas’s special favorites as a boy, a trunk made in 1807 for a minister of Napoleon, has elaborate concealed locks, one brass mechanism after another clicking open at an invisible touch, revealing multiple secret layers. In Emile-Maurice’s desk drawer are giant curvaceous zippers that he discovered in Canada and introduced to Europe as the fermature Hermès—a name that clung tenaciously to French zippers long after Emile-Maurice’s two-year patent had expired.

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….”

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.”

Hermès is creating 200 units each of six different Albers designs, selling for a not-expensive-but-costly 2,000 euros apiece. “And then,” Dumas says, “we will never print Josef again. This is a pledge.”

Together or separately, the half dozen Hommage au Carré scarves are an intense visual experience. There’s one in a white-silver palette, a lemon-sunshine one, a peachy-salmon, a noir, a blues, a green: four hues apiece. They’re supremely modern in their asymmetry. “Twenty years ago imbalance was disturbing to the eye,” Dumas says. “Today we really enjoy imbalance. We’re the cut-and-paste culture. We have a Mac when we’re 20. Our eye has evolved because our tools have evolved.”

Then again, many of the tools in an Hermès atelier have barely changed in centuries. I gawk at a workroom near Dumas’s office where a pair of leather artisans work Birkins with that famous, priceless saddle stitch, radio blaring. They’re actually smiling as they sew. It’s like some performance-art installation at the New Museum: The Lost World of Craft.

I think of Ménéhould de Bazelaire, surrounded by Hermèsian equineabilia. “The horse was the first rhythm of the road,” she says, clapping her hands in canter time. Then she gestures at the glass cases and moves the cantering hand to tap her chest, ba-boom, ba-boom. “With all this,” she continues, “you have the feeling you’re just passing by. Time is not something abstract but the beating of the heart.”

It’s easy in those oak-paneled rooms full of centuries’ worth of fantastic objects, representing millions of hours of handiwork, to perceive solid things as talismans, and as anchors of time. But Dumas, artistic and businesslike, has carried great-grandfather Hermès right on over into minimal, glass-walled number 26. “I question today where the border is between craft, applied art, and contemporary art,” he says. “I think that bridge between art and craft has collapsed. My mission is to reinvent that bridge over and over again.” He pauses, possibly thinking intensely colored, square thoughts, then declares firmly: “The world that bridge leads to is civilization.”

And civilization, though equipped with hand-stitched leathers and jewel-colored silks, is not about luxury. "Keeping the Faith" originally appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of Culture+Travel. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Culture+Travel's Fall 2008 Table of Contents.