Festival Des Métiers By Hermès...

Billed as, ‘the secret language of the Hermès ateliers’, the Festival des Métiers declares the French house to speak but one language: the language of luxury. While ‘luxury’ finds itself affixed to anything and everyone these days, Hermès has unequivocally defined understated luxury since 1837.

Like a travelling circus coming to town, Festival des Métiers is a coup de goût of spectacle and magnificence that arrives in London from China, before touring the Continent. Craftspeople from across France and Switzerland come together in a contemporary and interactive makeshift atelier under a canopy of trademark-orange wires and spotlighting, designed by Paola Navone, to perform their unparalleled craftsmanship for all to admire. 10 different crafts are being showcased at Chelsea’s Saatchi Gallery spanning leather handbags, fine-jewellery, silk and timepieces. 

In a defiant act against counterfeit culture, the specialist craftspeople reveal their practice tête-à-têtes with visitors at their workstations; the use of a special glue to stretch silk flat onto the printing bed; the process of constructing a tie with only a thread and needle, and the importance of a steady hand for a one-chance stroke when using platinum at €4000 for a few hundred millilitres.

Having recently recorded soaring profits in 2012 from its 364 worldwide boutiques, numbers are just as important in the boardroom as they are in the atelier. From its Parisian head office at 24 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, artwork is selected and consequently interpreted by in-house illustrators to reduce complex images into monochrome lines and shading that can take up to 2000 hours to complete before it can be sent to be screen printed, as well as entering into the archives of timeless design. 50 are the maximum number of gauze screens – relative to the number of colours required - that are involved to make a signature silk scarf. 900ºC is the temperature achieved to set the first brushstroke of a male tiger’s fleshy pink nose on a porcelain change tray before an outline can be transferred to the rest of the tray by hand. A silk garment requires 2 threads for the sabre artisan to cut away and transform a two-dimensional surface into a silk velvet relief. Hermès is the only luxury house left that continues to sabrage by hand, providing a bespoke service on ready to wear items and silk scarves that require several days for completion. Executed by a sole artisan, this fading skill is currently being taught to a handful of apprentices to preserve the traditions and values that Hermès continues to master across all its ateliers with finesse.

Go behind the scenes of ultimate luxury with this photo series (below) taken on the opening day...

Festival des Métiers runs to 27th May 2013 at Saatchi Gallery, London between 10am to 6pm - for more information visit hermes.com

Saatchi Gallery

Duke of York's Square

King's Road

London 

SW3 4RY

Wish You Were Here

Since 1991 Visionaire has pioneered the limited edition – bridging the worlds of art, fashion and design to create original and exclusive publications in all shapes and sizes. Different themes and formats are driven by each issue’s artistic direction that have included boxed, bagged and even audio presentations.

Inside Mr Porter's online closet is a selection of Visionaire’s highly collectible publications over the years that include issues by Hedi Slimane, Ricardo Tisci, Levi’s and Louis Vuitton. In 2000, Jean-Louis Dumas, President of Hermès created Issue 32 titled, Where?

Inspired by Dumas’s very own travel sketchbook, Where? takes the form of fifty-five silver-edged postcards with images contributed by international artists and photographers such as Andreas Gursky, Wolfgang Tillmans, Bruce Weber, David LaChapelle and Jeff Burton. The collection are presented in none other than a soft, tan leather pouch crafted in the workshop of the French luxury house in Paris.

An edition of 3500 numbered copies were produced and provide an alternative to the holiday postcard as well as a charming contemporary statement in an ever diminishing world of pen to paper correspondence. Whether it is from your private island or urban retreat these art postcards will guarantee best wishes for both sender and recipient par avion. 

Visit Visionaire to view their avant-garde series of issues to date.  

The Art Of Packing

This week I'm in Europe with Studio Velardi and before leaving for my first pit stop in Geneva, Switzerland I've been featured on the lifestyle blog I Am Packed. Founded earlier this year and sponsored by Air New Zealand, the site features a selection of items, packed and ready to go for any eventuality by travellers from around the world. 

I Am Packed provides the necessary association of contemporary-cool that brands, such as Air New Zealand, look for within social media. The unexpected submissions that resemble more art, than casual throw-in-a-suitcase snapshot, give both blog and airline the curatorial credentials that will have everyone admiring the art of packing. 

Check out what's inside my luggage between LHR and GVA here - more from Geneva on my return so until then, à bientôt tout le monde!

Out Of The Shadows

After its official presentation at Museum der Kulturen during Art Basel last week, Hiroshi Sugimoto's latest collaboration with the French luxury house of Hermès is now available in stores and the design and production process of the twenty-strong silk scarf collection by the Japanese photographer can be viewed online at its dedicated Hermès Editeur homepage. As I previously reported earlier in the year (Silk Snaps, March 2012) the limited edition ink-jet prints measuring fifty-five inches square have been inspired by Sugimoto's Color of Shadow (Couleurs de l'Ombre) series - based on luminous Polaroid colour gradations, this makes for yet another exciting addition to the luxury house's expanding artistic portfolio after Josef Albers and Daniel Buren whose collaborations may also be viewed online.

Below is an insight to the collaboration from drawing board to production line of the exclusive one hundred and forty art cum fashion works: each scarf colourway consists of an edition of seven, individually numbered by hand by the artist and priced at $7000.00 - an investment at a snap for both collector and connoisseur alike.  

Hiroshi Sugimoto at Hermès

Couleurs de l'Ombre will tour after Art Basel and is due to land in Brussels at La Verrière in September with further cities scheduled before the end of the year - for more details visit Hermès Editeur.
Images courtesy of Hermès

Luxury For The Senses

This weekend sees the closing of the celebrated exhibition Leather Forever by French luxury house Hermès and as promised, before leaving for Italy I paid a visit to Burlington Gardens to explore a material that remains the house’s ‘noblest conquest’.

If a brand was human, leather would be its skin and Hermès would be the top model of them all – charting the history of six generations up to the present Dumas family member Pierre-Alexis, who is artistic director, the story of Hermès is rich in style as well as substance.

Greeted by a specially commissioned leather-lined Citroën 2CV to mark the automobile company’s 60th anniversary in 2008, the message that visitors would be taken on a journey could not have been more clear. 

Up the stairs and past the unassuming marble statue (Kelly bag under her arm), the exhibition consists of twelve interactive rooms that have been exquisitely designed by Alexandra Plat and created by Speeg Michel and Sigmasix.

From the library of supple and exotic hides hung from pulley systems to the multimedia installation of the house’s signature orange boxes piled high adjacent to two leather craftsmen from the Pantin studios, surrounded by their customised tools and threads - if the first two rooms were anything to go by this was not to be any old retrospective. 

For anyone who receives the Hermès newsletter or visits the World of Hermès, you will already know creativity with a dash of wit are the key ingredients that keep this brand young and fresh. Between the vitrines of leather goods from the house’s archives and private loans – my favourite being the large bespoke artist’s portfolio – one is walking through a horseshow on white sand in one room and through a curtain of leather piping the next; an incredible digital display projects the motions of stitching and hardware on a series of leather bags and clutches, followed by the final products in all their glory set in a wondrous nomadic pop-up tent with jet set trunks and luggage, immersed in that trademark orange light. 

Subtle and discreet as is the brand, Leather Forever is an incroyable presentation of how to make an exhibition of one of the world’s most expensive luxury brands – free from brash logos – exciting, as well as accessible. Colour, texture and the perfume that is leather make this an exhibition for the senses and it is evident the same attention to detail curatorially has been directly inspired by the heritage of craft and execution that is simply Hermès.

This very execution par excellence features in the final room where four one-of-a-kind Passe-Guide bags have been created to represent England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Christie’s are currently conducting an online auction that will end on 31st May 2012 with all proceeds donated to the Royal Academy of Arts - visit Christies for more information.

 Leather Forever closes this Sunday 27^th May 2012 at 6pm

Leather Forever

6 Burlington Gardens

London

W1S 3ET

Images courtesy of Alexandra Plat