No wonder he felt skeptical. One day a
colleague showed up unexpectedly in Christophe Lemaire’s studio at
Hermès in Paris clutching a swatch of strange-looking felt that had come
all the way from Mongolia. She told him excitedly that it should be
possible to make a jacket from a single piece of it—no seams, no darts,
just felt.
“We made a pattern for a jacket and sent it to Mongolia, but to be
honest, I never expected anything to happen,” said Lemaire, who was
researching new fabrics for his first collection as artistic director of
women’s wear at Hermès. “But two weeks before the show, this guy flew
over with the jacket. The felt had been made using a traditional
Mongolian method of rolling cashmere yarn in water, like papier-mâché.
Then they sculpted it into a jacket. We made a few corrections. He took
it back, and the finished jacket arrived in Paris just in time for the
show. It’s amazing! A three-dimensional object. It feels extraordinary
to wear. Though I still don’t understand how they did it.”
That jacket was one of the standout pieces in the fall collection,
which is now being shipped to Hermès stores. Drawing on the skills of
the painstakingly trained artisans in Hermès’s workshops—as well as
those Mongolian craftsmen—Lemaire’s clothes (and that word is important,
because he sees himself as a designer of clothes, not fashion) are
impeccably made and simple in style. You can spot his love of
traditional African and Asian clothing in the softly draped caftans,
kurtas, and kimonos, as well as references to his favorite
late-Seventies collections by Anne Marie Beretta and Issey Miyake. “I
like clothes that suggest, rather than show, the body, and bring
attention to a woman’s wrists and neck,” said Lemaire. “Straight lines.
Big sleeves. Big pockets. Pure. Fluid. Quite geometric.”
Sitting beside a pyramid of Hermès’s signature orange boxes in its
Paris press office, Lemaire, a genial 46-year-old Frenchman in a
flea-market leather jacket, a khaki cotton shirt and pants, battered
Martin Margiela boots, and a 1975 Texas Instruments digital watch, looks
more like one of the army of indie designers and DJs hanging out in the
Marais than an artistic director at one at the world’s oldest and
grandest luxury houses. Though that’s not surprising, because an indie
designer (and onetime DJ) is exactly what he has been since launching
his own fashion label 20 years ago.
“Christophe is very clever and very cosmopolitan, but down-to-earth
and unassuming,” said industrial designer Marc Newson, who has been
friends with Lemaire since the mid-Nineties. “He has always been
passionate about his work, but I’ve never had a sense that there was
anything prima donna–ish about him.”
From left: A Mongolian felted cashmere jacket from
the fall 2011 ready-to-wear collection; a long, fur-stitched cashmere
cape from fall 2011.
Lemaire was not a fashionable choice to join Hermès when he was
appointed last summer to succeed Jean Paul Gaultier, the postmodernist
prankster and creator of Madonna’s conical bras. The fashionisti were
rooting for a young hotshot or a suitably cerebral heir to Gaultier’s
predecessor, the superpurist Martin Margiela. The firm favorite for that
slot was Helmut Lang, whom Hermès was known to have courted, but he
refused (for the umpteenth time) to forsake his new career as an artist
for a return to fashion. Lemaire, who had spent the past decade as
creative director of the French sportswear brand Lacoste, was an
unexpected and, to some, underwhelming appointee. Unveiling his fall
collection at the Hermès show in Paris this past March was his chance to
win over his critics.
The verdict was mixed. Some editors were unimpressed. “Perhaps the
collection suffered from too-muchness, a heaviness,” wrote Cathy Horyn
in The New York Times. But others approved, including Suzy Menkes of the International Herald Tribune,
who praised it as “a fine effort for a first season.” Another admirer
is Virginie Mouzat, fashion director of the French daily newspaper Le Figaro.
“I loved it!” she said. “The quality is irreproachable. Simple cuts.
Wonderful fabrics. Beautiful silks and leathers. Seasonless outfits. It
isn’t sexy, loud, or in your face, and for some people that can be
boring. It’s a very slow, discreet, low-key notion of luxury—more style
than fashion.”
And that is why Hermès hired Lemaire. “Christophe is very Hermès in
his thinking,” said his new boss, Pierre-Alexis Dumas, 45, Hermès’s
group artistic director and one of the sixth generation of the founding
family. “He shares the values we believe in—quality of craftsmanship,
attention to detail, absolute comfort, timeless elegance, and ensuring
that everything we make is impeccable. I believe in Christophe and think
he will surprise all of us.”
The stakes are high. Lemaire’s appointment is one of the most
important decisions Pierre-Alexis has made since assuming responsibility
for design and communications at Hermès from his father, its visionary
and charismatic former chairman, Jean-Louis Dumas, who died last year.
The latest women’s wear collection is one of a raft of new
projects—including the opening of a Paris homewares store in an old
swimming pool on rue de Sèvres and the launch of a furniture line—that
will set the tone for Hermès’s future under this generation. The current
CEO, Patrick Thomas, is not part of the family, but several of
Pierre-Alexis’s cousins have been given senior roles, including Axel
Dumas and Julie Guerrand, former investment bankers who are now chief
operating officer and head of corporate development, respectively.
The new collection of Hermès furniture.
Thrilling though it sounds to have inherited the home of the Kelly,
Birkin, and Constance bags, the current heirs face a fiendishly
difficult challenge: to repeat their forbears’ success in modernizing
Hermès while preserving its heritage. “Hermès is quite exceptional in
never having moved outside of its own zone of expertise and history,”
said Menkes. “Whenever it has moved forward, it has looked very deeply
at those issues, and every new project has always seemed to be
impregnated with Hermès and what it stands for.”
Many family firms seem to be cursed by the “Buddenbrooks syndrome,”
named after the 1901 novel in which Thomas Mann described the decline of
a once thriving mercantile dynasty as each generation became
progressively less able, entrepreneurial, and motivated—but not Hermès.
It has been 174 years since Thierry Hermès, the orphaned son of an
innkeeper, opened a workshop in Paris to make horse harnesses for
Europe’s poshest and richest families. He was succeeded by his son,
Emile-Charles Hermès, who moved the business to rue du Faubourg
Saint-Honoré in 1880, and opened a saddlery there. His sons took over
from him, and so on. Hermès has become more and more eclectic over the
years as each set of heirs has added something new. The third generation
applied the company’s leatherworking skills to bags in 1900, when
Emile-Maurice Hermès realized that horse-drawn carriages would soon be
replaced by motorcars. The fourth generation transferred the house’s
traditional expertise in making racing silks to scarves in 1937. One of
Hermès’s best-selling scarves of all time is still the gloriously horsey
Brides de Gala (the Gala Bridles), introduced in 1957.
More recently, Jean-Louis and the fifth generation turned Hermès
into a business-school case study of how to transform a historic family
firm into a multibillion-dollar global brand. When he became chairman in
1978, Hermès’s annual turnover was roughly $50 million; by the time he
retired in 2006 it was almost $2 billion. Textbook-worthy as his
management style was, Jean-Louis also followed his instincts by
persuading Margiela and later Gaultier to join Hermès, as well as men’s
wear designer Véronique Nichanian and shoe designer Pierre Hardy, who
have been with the company for more than 20 years. And he never lost the
family flair for playfulness. Said Nichanian: “One of the things I
adore about Hermès is that, as well as being such a classic
house—elegant, exact, and moral—it has a fantastical quality, and does
things that can seem completely crazy.”
A new best-seller was born when
Jean-Louis found himself sitting beside actress Jane Birkin on a flight
from Paris to London in 1984. He asked why she was carrying a scruffy
straw bag, and Birkin explained that she’d never seen a handbag she’d
wanted to buy. Jean-Louis invited her to come into the workshops to
design her dream bag, which he named in her honor. Another success was
hatched when Margiela suggested that Hermès might replace the leather
band of the Cape Cod watch, which had been introduced to the collection
seven years before, with one twice the length. The double-band Cape Cod
was introduced in 1998, and it has become the fashion pack’s favorite
watch.
The HermEs of today is still headquartered in Emile-Charles’s
building on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where Emile-Maurice’s office
is preserved as the Hermès Museum. The apple, pear, and magnolia trees
in the rooftop garden are still tended by a family gardener. And a team
of six artisans still makes bespoke saddles in a saddlery. So confident
is Hermès of their workmanship that it undertakes to repair them
anytime, regardless of their age. While I was there, one craftsman was
repairing a saddle made in 1929. Hermès sold some $3.4 billion worth of
its saddles, bags, watches, and everything else last year. It could have
sold much more if only it had been able to produce enough to satisfy
everyone on its famously long waiting lists.
It’s a remarkable legacy, but the sixth generation’s efforts to
nurture it have encountered an unexpected, and unwelcome, obstacle:
French luxury mogul Bernard Arnault. To make a very long, very
complicated financial story short, Arnault—known in the luxury industry
as “the wolf in cashmere clothing” because of the ruthlessness with
which his LVMH group has acquired a succession of prestigious brands,
including Dior, Louis Vuitton, and Bulgari—astonished the family last
October by announcing that he owned 14.2 percent of Hermès shares. He
had been buying them secretly, though wholly legally, since 2001, and
bought more after the announcement. At press time, his shareholding
stood at 20.2 percent.
All of Arnault’s public statements about his intentions toward
Hermès have been courteous and conciliatory, but, as the family is well
aware, he has said equally reassuring things before pouncing on other
prey. So it has closed ranks against him: Guerrand quit her job at Paris
investment bank Rothschild & Cie when her boss, David de
Rothschild, told her that he had been advising Arnault. Some 73 percent
of Hermès shares are owned by the 52 heirs of Thierry Hermès, eight of
whom work for the company. Most, though not all, of the heirs have
placed their holdings in a specially created financial structure that
makes it extremely difficult—but not impossible—for Arnault or anyone
else to secure a majority shareholding, or even a seat on the board.
“Hermès has grown out of a family culture with a set of values that
we all believe in,” said Pierre-Alexis. “I am convinced it would
disappear if the family dimension was taken away or diluted. You know,
there have been a lot of very good, small restaurants in Paris that have
been bought by big chains over the years, usually in the name of better
management. But somehow their clients have stopped going, because they
have lost their souls.”
Arnault is wealthy and stealthy enough to play a long game, hoping
that wayward family members will eventually weaken. The same strategy
has worked for him in the past, notably at Louis Vuitton, just as it did
for media mogul Rupert Murdoch when he wrested control of The Wall Street Journal
from the Bancroft family. Imagine if the same thing happened to your
family: Wouldn’t you worry about a cash-strapped cousin or grouchy uncle
selling out?
Not that there would be anything you could do to stop them. “This
whole situation has been an incentive to work even harder,” said
Pierre-Alexis. “I have told everybody, ‘Listen, guys—it’s time to be
more Hermès than ever.’” Still, it must be tough, especially coming so
soon after the deaths of both of his parents. His mother, Rena Dumas,
who designed Hermès’s stores, died a year before her husband, in 2009.
“She and Jean-Louis Dumas were an amazing team, and she had a tremendous
input into the modernization of Hermès,” said Menkes. “But that era is
over. When Jean-Louis Dumas was still with us, there was very much the
sense that he was the life force of the company. Pierre-Alexis has taken
over that role of keeping Hermès as a brand of desire, quality, and
authenticity. We have yet to see if he has the same ability. When a
company as big as Hermès changes direction, you don’t see the results
for a long time.”
Boyish looking and soft-spoken, Pierre-Alexis has been in long-term
training for the role. He has worked for Hermès ever since studying
visual arts at Brown University, with stints in the Hong Kong and London
offices before returning to Paris in 2004 to work under his father as
deputy artistic director. While in London, he studied drawing and
painting in his spare time. “They are my passions,” he explained. “But I
also knew that if I was going to work in product development, I needed
to be able to read the designers’ drawings very quickly.” His own taste
is classically modernist. He loves Mies van der Rohe’s architecture and
Josef Albers’s paintings, but is also an archaeology buff.
There is no sign of Hermès’s famously stringent standards wavering
under his watch. The company employs 3,500 artisans, all working at full
capacity. Some 1,000 new artisans have been hired in the past five
years, and Hermès is building a huge new production center at Pantin, a
northern suburb of Paris, near the existing one, a glass palace designed
by Rena Dumas that looks more like a research laboratory than a
factory. But training new artisans takes years. Typically leather
craftsmen study for two years at leather schools before joining Hermès
and spending 18 months at its own school. They then do basic tasks while
training “on the job.” It takes anywhere from six to 10 years before
they can make every style of bag in all of the leathers, even
ultratricky crocodile. Once they are trained, the leather craftsmen work
on up to four bags at once, devoting roughly 20 hours to each one.
That’s why you can’t expect to walk into an Hermès store and buy
whichever bag you wish. “Our biggest challenge is to preserve our
quality,” said Nichanian. “It must never, ever be compromised.”
Like so many things about Hermès, such statements may once have
seemed quaint—but today they appear prescient, now that Gucci and Louis
Vuitton are running advertising campaigns declaring their devotion to
craftsmanship. And at a time when the fashion industry is still reeling
from John Galliano’s scandal-scarred dismissal from Dior, Hermès’s
insistence on working with several different creative directors,
including Nichanian, Hardy, and now Lemaire, rather than one omnipotent
figure, as Galliano once appeared to be, seems sage.
So does its refusal to engage with the frenzied, irreverent culture
of Facebook, Twitter, and the blogosphere that many of its rivals are
struggling—and mostly failing—to tame. “There has always been a feeling
of secrecy about Hermès,” said Le Figaro’s Mouzat. “It comes
from the family—low key, low profile, Calvinist. And today that makes it
seem almost sacred in the luxury landscape.”
Still, Hermès, like the rest of the luxury industry, faces the
challenge of a volatile market, where growth is driven increasingly by
ingenue consumers in Asia, whose tastes in expensive clothes and bags
tend to be closer to Kim Kardashian’s than Christine Lagarde’s. Earlier
this summer I spotted a wealthy Chinese tourist looking at bags in the
Hermès flagship on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The sales assistant
brought over a pretty, pale blue clutch for her to inspect, only for the
woman to ask: “Don’t you have anything blingier?” “Perhaps Madame
should try another store,” purred the assistant.
Madame could have popped into the watch department, where she would
have found a couple of surprisingly “un-Hermès” diamond-encrusted
watches, such as a Cape Cod in rose gold with an alligatorskin band that
sells for $17,200 in the U.S. But these are exceptions.
Sixth-generation Hermès has mostly held its nerve and resisted the
temptation to bling-ify.
The new furniture line, which was unveiled at the Milan furniture
fair this past April, is very old-school Hermès. Each piece is
exquisitely fabricated and conservative in style—quite bon chic bon genre, as the French call their equivalent of preppies.
An intriguing glimpse of what could become new-school Hermès is
Shang Xia, a recent collection of products including eggshell porcelain
bowls and lacquered chairs based on Ming dynasty furniture-making
techniques. It is cheaper than the main line, and has been developed for
sale in China, using the skills of local craftsmen. Another is the
stunning rue de Sèvres store, where a series of latticed ashwood “huts,”
designed by Rena Dumas’s collaborator, Denis Montel, perch on the
immaculately restored mosaic tiles of an old swimming pool.
The latest women’s wear collection sits somewhere between the old
and new schools. Commercially, it will not make or break Hermès: Women’s
wear contributes less than 10 percent of its annual turnover, and the
brand has been robust enough to embrace two very different designers in
the ascetic Margiela and flamboyant Gaultier. But women’s wear has huge
symbolic significance, given the intense media scrutiny of fashion. And
Lemaire’s first show, held amid the latticed huts of the rue de Sèvres
store and accompanied by a Chinese zither player, was seen as a
declaration of intent for Pierre-Alexis’s vision.
“We all agreed that the show had to be very special and everything
had to count—the space, the casting, the music,” said Lemaire. “We were
looking for a live band, and it wasn’t easy to find the right one.
Eventually my girlfriend found this great Chinese artist, and of course
Pierre-Alexis wanted to hear the music. He sent me a very nice text
saying, ‘Okay, it’s strange, it’s interesting, and it’s your choice.
Let’s go for it.’ I said, ‘Great, but do you think it is Hermès enough?’
And he said, ‘That’s not for me to say. It’s your choice.’ I really
appreciated his openness.”
He also appreciates working in a proudly unfashiony house, which
shuns such public relations ploys as making red-carpet dresses or
Twitter-genic runway pieces that never go into production. “For years I
felt like I didn’t really belong in fashion, because I’d look at my
colleagues and I couldn’t share their hysteria about shows, models, and
switching from one thing to another every season,” said Lemaire. “I’m
interested in the practicality of a timeless wardrobe of essentials that
women will wear for years. And that’s what Hermès is about.”
It is certainly what Pierre-Alexis wants him to deliver: “Most
companies are finance driven, but Hermès is object driven, and that’s
very rare,” he said. “Objects shouldn’t be disposable—they should last,
living with you year after year until you give them to your friends or
your children. One of Hermès’s strengths is that we have always made
horses’ harnesses, and a harness can never break.”
