Collection FW2015: Mélodie Chromatique

Musical notes and colours show close affinities: abstract art pioneer Wassily Kandinsky evoked the musicality of colour in modern painting, and composer Olivier Messiaen celebrated the perpetual dialogue of sound and colour.

Virgine Jamin’s design evokes the pipes and bowls of a complex still, or a curious arrangement of organ pipes. ‘Colours are musical notes,’ she says. If so, then the silk carrés of Hermès, with their endlessly-inventive, perfectly-balanced chromatic harmonies, are alive with resonant, vibrant sound, inspiring a poetic choreography in the wearer. 

Here, each colour bears a hint of the nuance to come, just as each step heralds the next.

Collection FW2015: Tatersale

Four heads come face-to-face on a chequered blanket.  Carefully placed, decked in head- and neck-guards tied with bows, the horses’ heads are transformed into stylish figurines.

Named for Tattersalls – England’s most prestigious equine auction house, founded in 1766 – this carré adopts one of the many alternative spellings of the family name, which has changed down the centuries, like so many others.  The simple, precise, structured design showcases the panoply of bridlery used for the showing of horses: canvas straps, steel bits, leather harnesses.  Just part of the arsenal of the equestrian arts, transformed by Henri d’Origny into attrative, geometric compositions of decorative motifs, sometimes swirling in arabesque curves, sometimes quiet and well-behaved, neatly arranged in squares, as here.

Collection FW2015: Harnais des Présidents

Collection FW2015: Millefleurs du Mexique

Collection FW2015: Minuit au Faubourg

The clock strikes twelve.  Midnight in Paris, and the city seems calm and quiet.  But a signal beams out from the Eiffel Tower: a call to Super H!  Something’s afoot.  Masked and cloaked, the proud horse atop the Hermès building undergoes a strange metmorphosis, ready for action.  We watch breathlessly as he prepares to take flight – a modern Pegasus for the world of the comic strip.

A few seasons ago, another carré – Quand soudain (‘When suddenly…’) – showed him with his rider, galloping, mane rippling in the wind.  Here, watched from a discreet distance by his groom, standing behind a nearby window, he sports a super-hero costume all his own.  What’s about to happen? Find out next time, in the adventures of Super H.

Collection FW2015: Pégase Pop

Mount of the gods, friend of the Muses, Pegasus, the winged horse of Antiquity is transfigured by the magic of Pop culture… He can summon a spring, gushing forth with one strike of his hoof, but his name is associated with storms, too – Zeus chose him to carry thunderbolts and lightning to Mount Olympus. 

And it is in this role that Dimitri Rybaltchenko chooses to depict the winged brother of the beloved Hermès horse, bursting out from behind the clouds in a brilliant flash of lightning. Hatched lines, bold forms and contours, flat expanses of colour, dots, and explosive energy, coupled with simple, effective line… American Pop Art is a wingbeat away!

Collection FW2015: Le Fil d'Ariane

Ariadne was the daughter of Minos, King of Crete, and his queen Pasiphaë, daughter of Helios. She is mostly associated with mazes and labyrinths, due to her involvement in the myths of the Minotaur and Theseus.  Her father put her in charge of the labyrinth where sacrifices were made as part of reparations (either to Poseidon or to Athena, depending on the version of the myth); however, she would later help Theseus in overcoming the Minotaur and saving the would-be sacrificial victims. 

In other stories, she became the bride of the god Dionysus, with the question of her background as being either a mortal or a goddess varying in those accounts.

Collection FW2015: A la plume

"A simple design, fluttering like a bird at the window". A delightful simile for the scarf, hand-drawn by the one and only Florence Manlik (we got acquainted to her thanks to the beautiful Brides de Gala en Finesse).  This is the perfect evocation of an image as delicate and light as a feather. 

Like a collection of quills, the multicoloured plumes spell out ‘Hermès Paris’, the words poised to float away on the air.  Myriad fine lines compose this ethereal, colourful composition, seemingly wafted onto the soft silk square by the breath of creativity itself.  Inspiration a-plenty, infinite patience, intense concentration...  

A unique approach to the art of drawing, based on the extraordinary precision of a single gesture, repeated a thousand times over.

Collection FW2015: Manufacture de Boucleries

Throughout his life, Emile Hermès, that inveterate collector, amassed a magnificent ensemble of objects and books devoted to the equestrian arts. Among the works acquired on his travels, these catalogues advertise the range of products made by a 19th-century harness buckle factory.

Memory is central to the work of Italian-born designer, artist, illustrator and author Gianpaolo Pagni, an adoptive Parisian who collaborates with numerous French and international publications including Le Monde, La Stampa and the Washington Post.

 Pagni creates stamped designs in a bewildering array of forms, using them to cover and transfigure the pages of more prosaic documents – magazines or schoolbooks –, generating mysterious signs and symbols. Accumulation and repetition create an intimate, poetic archaeology all their own.  The bits and stirrups, curb chains, hame chains and stable rings featured in the album spring to life under Pagni’s magical touch, forging a new link between his work and the house of Hermès.

Collection FW2015: Original Trocadero Jazz Band

The Original Trocadéro Jazz Band? The name belongs to a combo featuring drummer Jean-Louis Dumas!

Four boys, the best friends in the world, share a passion for comic books and New Orleans ‘trad’ jazz. In 1948, they decide to start their own band.  The trombone player – and later, designer Sophie Koechlin’s father – sold his collection of miniature Dinky Toy cars to pay for his instrument.  ‘The best band you’ve never heard of’ featured up to ten musicians, playing up a storm on Saturday nights: Sidney Bechet’s classic ‘slow’ Si tu vois ma mère, Louis Armstrong’s much livelier Les oignons…  They knew and loved Louisiana, though they’d never set foot in the state. Inevitably, life took them in different directions, to other adventures.  But their friendship, and their love of music, remained.

Collection FW2015: Lettres d'Erevan

In the year 405 AD, Mesrop Mashtots – learned monk and visionary – invented the Armenian alphabet. 

The first words he wrote were a quotation attributed to King Solomon: ‘To know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding…’ 

This scarf is also a tribute to the vast library of Erevan, the Matenadaran, an extraordinary monument to the power of knowledge. Often compared to the great library of Alexandria, the collection enjoys UNESCO World Heritage status today. It includes some of Christianity’s finest and most ancient books and manuscripts.  

Designer Karen Petrossian has covered the surface of this scarf with illuminated letters from the Armenian alphabet, whose calligraphy and miniatures, drawn from the pages of manuscripts preserved at the famous library, are considered among the masterpieces of medieval art. 

For the second time, Hermès extends a silken bridge between two cultures, with a limited edition scarf supporting the cultural and humanitarian work of the SPFA (Solidarité Protestante France-Arménie).