There are few pit stops during Milan Design Week quite as delightful as a visit to the Hermès showroom. At their longtime home (during Salone del Mobile, at least) of La Pelota Jai Alai – an event space in the heart of the Brera design district – a sun-dappled outdoor courtyard invites you to take a seat on colourful, custom-made outdoor furniture, or stop by the coffee truck set up at one end for an espresso. (It’s served in a paper cup printed with a pattern from the maison’s latest homewares collection, naturally.)
This year, however – after an attendant with a silk scarf tied around their neck opened the doorway to the space’s interior – visitors were greeted by a more unexpected mise-en-scène. In place of the grand theatrical installations that have defined Hermès presentations in years prior, the room was bathed in darkness and at first appeared relatively spartan. Until, that is, you took a few steps further in and turned your gaze downward: covering the enormous floor was a striking series of panels covered variously with raw earth, terracotta, bricks, rocks, adobe, and wood, with criss-crossing black walkways overlaid to create the effect of walking through an archaeological site.
This air of history was fitting, given Hermès first launched its “home universe” over a century ago – its offerings eventually ranging from furniture and dinnerware to objets d’arts (and, yes, those cashmere blankets that have become something of a status symbol among the 1 per cent). Taken together, the collection serves not only as adornment for the home, but also an expression of the house’s unparalleled artisanal savoir faire.
Yet as I settled into the auditorium-style seating that overlooks the space, and began speaking to Charlotte Macaux Perelman and Alexis Fabry, the artistic directors of Hermès Maison for a decade now, their mood was less reflective than one might expect – in part because they’re still catching their breath after spending the past few weeks working on the project’s complicated install. “For the past month we’ve been kneeling on the floor,” Macaux Perelman says with a laugh. “It’s been like an anthill – working with the most exceptional people.”
This year, Macaux Perelman and Fabry wanted to bring some of the more playful elements of their work at Hermès back down to terra firma. “We wanted to work with the earth, because we believe that the earth expresses our heritage – it anchors us, it’s our roots, it’s our base,” says Macaux Perelman. “It’s about our attraction to raw materials – to what is simple, and how to preserve the original qualities of the material.” This being Hermès, however, the raw materials – leather, limestone, granite, silver – are some of the finest on the planet, and once they’ve passed through the hands of Hermès’s teams of craftspeople, they’re transformed into objects of the utmost elegance. Or, in Fabry’s words, it’s “the idea of a material that becomes sublime through a gesture.”
That philosophy was most visible in a corridor running along the back of the room, where 21 new objects and furniture pieces were displayed next to items from the Hermès archives, artfully curated to appear in dialogue. A graceful lamp with a braided leather stem was placed near a 1980s hunting whip with a deer antler hook, while a new collection of porcelain dinnerware featuring braided patterns around the edge was presented side by side with a 1950s rope strap. Elsewhere, a hand-painted bamboo light designed by Tomás Alonso communed with the geometric forms of a Loop necklace from 2003; and the rhythmic patterns of a blanket found an echo in the lacquered chevrons of a 1930s cigarette case. (The most photographed pieces – as far as I saw, at least – were the vintage jockey’s blouses displayed alongside an armchair, a bedspread, and a leather tray.)
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the newer creations had been inspired directly by the historic items, but in fact, they were the product of Macaux Perelman and Fabry rooting around the Hermès archives during the curatorial process, and finding pieces that spoke to their studio’s artisanal creations in the present. “It was a very exciting search, and it was important for us that there is this ambiguity between the new creations and the objects that belong to the past, and the connections between them. It’s also comforting to know that these are objects that have managed to resist the test of time,” Macaux Perelman says.
Returning after our conversation to look at the objects again, I found it was a sentiment that rang true. There’s a sense of time looping back on itself as you see the endless ways in which the house’s most identifiable motifs – weaves, chain links, quilting, equestrian details – seem to repeat in endless variations across mediums, across decades, across generations. “It’s funny, because year after year Charlotte and I have this same conversation – about the continuum between all of the different fields of Hermès,” Fabry notes. “There’s a kind of leitmotif across all of these fields – and what we’ve done is add a new step in that history.”
Indeed, most extraordinary is the ability of the Hermès Maison studios to work with such a wide variety of designers and makers, and then gather them into a cohesive whole – one that is unmistakably, well, Hermès. Is there a common thread that Macaux Perelman and Fabry have identified among the creatives and craftspeople they’re drawn to? Have they identified any throughlines during their 10-year journey at the house? “I think that’s a question that we should be asking you,” says Fabry, with a wide smile. Perhaps that’s the secret to their success, after all: a boundless curiosity.
