Collection SS2016: Bain de Mer

Jean-Louis Clerc met Robert Dumas in 1950, when the artist was in his forties, with a string of prestige collaborations to his name.  Clerc went on to create a dozen carrés with the house of Hermès.  Bain de mer is based on an original drawing belonging to Jean-Louis Clerc’s family. 

The decade is the 1950s. On a deserted beach, a young woman in a broad-brimmed hat sits gazing at the sea. Her name is Minouche, and she is none other than the artist’s wife, captured with his characteristically lively, light touch, in just a few lines, evoking the graphic elegance of an era. Duplicated here, the drawing suggests a strip of vintage film, a sweet souvenir of summer, the kind we warm to on a cold winter night.

Collection SS2016: The Savana Dance

 Chased by a leopard, a vervet monkey turns to face its predator, his expression anxious and uncertain. In Zulu culture, the leopard symbolises royalty, while the vervet monkey represents intelligence and wit – fine qualities, though they may not be enough to save his life here.  But who knows?  Giant King Protea blooms (South Africa’s national flower) surround the two protagonists, and the carré is framed with a border of amazumpa motifs, used in Zulu pottery.  Ardmore is a collective of Zulu, Zimbabwean and Sotho artisan potters, founded in 1985 by Fée Halsted, in Kwazulu Natal, South Africa. 

Today, the group numbers seventy members: creative artists dedicated to reinventing traditional styles, united by their recognition of what our common humanity and fraternity truly mean: that each of us exists thanks to others. This carré marks the beginning of a new collaboration between the collective, and the house of Hermès.

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: 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: Un Week-End dans l'Espace

Never at a loss for inspiration, fashion illustrator and adoptive Parisian Saw Keng takes us (and his thoroughly Parisian cast of figures) on the ultimate journey! We might picture his Parisiennes taking a leisurely stroll around town, a bracing walk on the beach, a quiet ride through an autumn forest. But we’d be wrong! Space is indeed the final frontier, but the ladies take to their intergalactic adventure with the style and grace of their counterparts on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. 

Similar to "Les Confessions", like the heroines of some all-new, star-struck comic book, they listen to the music of the spheres and the whinnying of their space-horses, riding to the planet Hermès and its many moons…