MATERIAL WORLD

THE CREATIVE MINDS BEHIND HERMÈS MAISON UNFOLD THEIR UNIVERSE OF OBJECT-MAKING

WOOD

Alvaro Siza, Karumi bench (2017); bamboo, titanium structure. Available through Hermès.

We wanted to work with Alvaro Siza because architects have a relationship to time that is totally different from designers. For Siza’s design the know-how in Portugal no longer exists, so we ended up finding someone in Japan who was able to do it. The material is layered bamboo, which allows you to bend it. But to kind of keep those round edges strong, it has a little titanium bone inside. We call it techno-artisanat, or technocraft. — Charlotte Macaux Perelman

Charlotte Macaux Perelman and Alexis Fabry may seem like an unusual pairing to spearhead the home furnishing range of one of the world’s most renowned luxury brands. And yet, the architect and lawyer-turned-art-book-publisher, respectively, have been at the helm of Maison since 2014, quietly but determinedly steering the Hermès world of object-making for almost ten years. Their responsibilities also include Hermès’s sister brands Saint Louis (crystal) and Puiforcat (silver). They recently released a line of silver tableware for the latter, based on an unrealized project Donald Judd worked on in the 1980s. Founded in 1837, Hermès remains steeped in tradition, and the Hermès Maison collection is no exception. Launched in 1928 under the stewardship of interior designer Jean-Michel Frank, Hermès Maison represents both a field of experimentation and a reinforcement of the company’s core values. PIN–UP visited Hermès’s Paris headquarters on rue Faubourg Saint Honoré to meet with Macaux Perelman and Fabry to crack the code of what exactly makes Hermès Hermès.

WOOD

Jasper Morrisson, Equilibre d’Hermès chair (2020); natural oak with a removable seat in saddle-stitched leather. Available through Hermès.

Ever since Alexis and I arrived at Hermès, we’ve wanted to work with Jasper. He is not a typical designer, and we admire his unique relationship to materials. He makes objects that seem self-evident and yet their design requires a lot of thought. The initial brief we gave him was that the chair had to have the qualities of the chair he designed in 1998 for the La Tourette monastery. The easiest thing, he told us, would be to take it and rework it. — Charlotte Macaux Perelman

Cecilie Manz, Ancelle archmair (2023); solid oak, leather. Available through Hermès.

At Hermès we love chêne, or oak, because it’s a timeless French wood. It’s everywhere. It’s in our forests. It’s used for floors, for construction. When Cecilie Manz first started designing the Ancelle chair, she was leaning toward a lighter wood, like ash. We told her that it may be a Scandinavian armchair, but it’s a French Scandinavian armchair. She loved the idea, and so we made it in oak. — Charlotte Macaux Perelman

Oak has a nice natural texture. It’s not too smooth. It has a very nice vibration. But of course, it always depends on what you do with it. When we started at Hermès, everything was in a more covered, stained wood. We prefer it natural, raw. — Alexis Fabry

METAL

Donald Judd, Eight-piece dinner set, (2023); sterling silver. Available through Puiforcat.

Flavin Judd showed us sketches his father had done. He told us: “My father tried to do this service in porcelain, but he didn’t like it. Therefore we never did anything with it.” We asked if we could give it a try in silver. Flavin agreed, but he probably thought we wouldn’t be successful. We worked on it for four years. It required a lot of development because the flat surface had to hit at a specific temperature, while the cylinder had to be hit at a different temperature. It took the artisans at Puiforcat many hours to determine how this whole thing could be assembled together. We’re very happy with it because the silver gives such materiality to the plate. There’s vibration. — Charlotte Macaux Perelman

Donald Judd, Eight-piece dinner set, (2023); sterling silver. Available through Puiforcat.

We believe the result is interesting because it's very abstract, it's very simple. It joins the two Judds: the very post-industrial Judd with the very sharp lines, and the vernacular one. — Alexis Fabry

Felix Burrichter: In 2023 you launched the collaboration between the Judd Foundation and Puiforcat with a line of sterling tableware. In addition to his art, Donald Judd was also famous for creating total environments in his life, from the architecture, to the furniture, down to the teaspoon. Looking at your output over almost ten years, one gets the sense that Hermès Maison is a similarly total environment, at many different scales

Charlotte Marcaux Perelman: I like the term environment better than collection. Because even though we present our “collection” once a year in Milan, Hermès Maison is more of an ongoing harmony between a lot of different objects. There is chromatic harmony, material harmony, stylistic harmony. For us, every scale is important. So it could be a very tiny object. It could be a plate, or much bigger, like a sofa.

Alexis Fabry: It’s an accidental harmony. We always try to make a new object, one that doesn’t say exactly the same thing that the previous one did. But the harmony is in the outcome, when you accumulate what you’ve done and look at it altogether.

CMP: What is so special about Judd is that he’s an artist, but he’s also a designer who likes everyday objects: his furniture, his table, his pitcher. When you go to the foundation, you see all those rich materials, all those objects, and how everything harmonizes.

Judd is canonized as a hardline minimalist. But he had a decorative side. He loved craft.

AF: And we have that too, for sure. There is a Protestant rigor with respect to craft that is a strong part of Hermès. There is a humility and a strictness.

I never thought of Hermès as Protestant.

AF: It’s in the DNA of the company. Once, a journalist asked Tomas Alonso: “what is an Hermès object for you?” And he replied: “A well done object.” That’s our goal. Hermès is a combination of things that are sometimes contradictory. For example, there’s the rigor I just described, but there’s also color and a joyful relation to the world. Some objects have to carry the joy, and some objects have to carry the strictness.

CMP: That’s why we also give a lot of attention to small objects, because other people could not care less about them. But for us, they’re important because they’re everywhere.

TEXTILE

Contour d'Hermès sofa (2023); structure in wood and aluminium, upholstered in wool and cotton slub canvas, feather cushions, full leather buttons, piping and feet sheathed in H bullcalf. Available through Hermès.

We are very proud of the Contour d'Hermès sofa because we worked on it quite a bit. Originally, it was much more “designed.” Our goal was to un-design it. To create something that looks like it has always been there, like a beautiful family heirloom. At the beginning, it had a big Hermès logo on it. But we removed it, and instead we added the Hermès buttons with six holes, an invention by Martin Margiela: you stitch the six buttons together and they create an “H.” It’s just a discreet little button that will tell you that it was made by Hermès. — Charlotte Macaux Perelman

Carson Converse, Williamstown quilted bed cover, (2021); cashmere, gold thread. Available through Hermès.

We like to experiment a lot. Take this quilt, for example. Usually at Hermès, textiles are about color. So we challenged ourselves to do something in white cashmere. Not only white, but also gold, which is not something we’re usually keen on either. We used gold thread, and we worked everything by hand. She stitches everything herself, with the machine. It took her one month to stitch one quilt. It’s one of my favourite pieces. — Charlotte Macaux Perelman

What is the selection process for creating new objects? Do you open the big Hermès closet and say: we need new cups, or we need new chairs?

CMP: We work as a team and, so it’s a collaboration. Ideas come by accident. There’s no limit because, everything is possible.

AF: There’s an amazing freedom in the art direction. We can do anything.

You don’t hear that very often.

AF: Thankfully we were never asked to be successful, in the conventional sense. We were asked to make things that we would all be proud of. We try to make things we like. And that is an amazing definition of success. And we try to do things differently. It’s an accumulation of layers.

CMP: When we arrived at Hermès, we didn’t really know how to translate the Hermès aesthetic to objects. We asked Pierre Alexis [Dumas]: “Is Hermès the sac Kelly, or is it the scarf?” And he said: “both.” So, we understood quickly that the furniture has to be rigorous, very sharp, very strict. We like materials to be themselves, we try not to cover things up. We try not to have covered leather, for example. And the wood, we try to keep it as raw as possible. And then the throws, the textiles, or the porcelain pieces carry the color, the joy.

AF: We also have to be very cautious to differentiate between the brands. Hermès has a very specific line that has no relation with what we can do at Puiforcat or Saint Louis. Because there are some things we could say about one that we can certainly not say about the other. For example, even if we think the DNA of Donald Judd is highly compatible with Hermès, the Judd project would have been impossible to do at Hermès. So Puiforcat and Saint Louis also act as a laboratoire, doing things that we could never do at Hermès.

GLASS

Harri Koskinen, Souffle d’Hermès lamps, (2023); hand-blown glass, metal and leather base, LED light. Available through Hermès.

We wanted to explore materials linked to fire. So we asked the designer Harri Koskinen to create a glass object. It needed to light up. It’s a lamp but it’s also a sculptural object. There’s always a collaboration with designers, but also with the craftspeople. To find the right materiality of glass for Souffle d’Hermès, for example, it took us seven years. Because it’s all about the colors. In the end, we found a talented craftsperson in Switzerland who was able to create exactly the right color range. — Charlotte Macaux Perelman

LEATHER

Jasper Morrison, Conservatoire chair, (2023); oak, leather. Available through Hermès.

We’re always asking ourselves: what is the place of leather in our collection? Does it need to have leather to be Hermès? So when we use it, we don’t want it to be decorative. At Hermès, the leather should be structural. It’s strength. It’s the part of the architecture of the object. — Charlotte Macaux Perelman

In this chair, leather is an integral part of the structure. We found it in Neuilly, in an old apartment where all the chairs were made by Hermès. It was such a perfect chair. So well done. We asked ourselves, how do you modify something that was so beautiful in the 1940s and make it function today? We asked Jasper [Morrison] to give it a slight modification, something that wouldn’t even be seen, but would make the chair seem like it was designed today. The result is beautiful. And intellectually it’s very interesting. — Alexis Fabry

PORCELAIN

Jochen Gerner, Saut Hermès tableware, (2023); hand-painted porcelain. Available through Hermès.

In porcelain, the pile [l’emempilement] is very important. It requires a know-how that we’ve really mastered at Hermès. Some of the designs are more classique; others are more exuberant, with classic Hermès patterns; they’re very minimal designs. Some are formal, some are casual. It’s very important that the porcelain tells a lot of different stories. But at the end of the day, we deeply care about the pile. — Charlotte Macaux Perelman

Hermès always had a strong history with porcelain. So when we started, we had to think about how to make a difference, how to create a new direction. I think, little by little, we’ve managed to go quite far from where porcelain was when we got here. — Alexis Fabry

Do you share resources between the three companies?

CMP: No, they’re really completely separate teams. They know each other, but they never work together. Alexis and I are the bridge between the three: Saint Louis, Puiforcat, and Hermès.

How do you select your collaboration?

AF: There’s a group of designers we like to work with. But there aren't that many, to be honest. [Laughs.]

I’d love to see that list.

CMP: Collaborations should be very smooth and full of trust and they can go on for years. It takes time. We have to love what they do. We give them a lot of freedom. At first, we just talk about the project. When we worked with Cecile [Manz], we wanted to do a Scandinavian chair. So, we thought, okay, we’ll go to her. We worked with Alvaro Siza because architects have a relationship to time that is totally different from designers. We thought that an architect would understand that an object has to last. An Hermès object should be of the moment, but not too of the moment. It’s a balance.

AF: There’s a relation to time that is very specific to Hermès. For example, it has taken us seven years, but we now have exclusively objects that we’ve worked on in Hermès stores around the world store. Luckily, at Hermès time is on our side.