The Hermès carré – a silk scarf named for its square shape and to distinguish it from the lesser ‘foulards’ of other houses – is one of the Parisian house’s most prized exports, recognised around the world for its vivid compositions of colour and print, and the delicacy of its construction. The latter is the result of hours of labour by dedicated artisans in Lyon, France, across two sites where each scarf is printed and finished by hand. ‘When you see all of the steps,’ says Cécile Pesce, the current creative director of Hermès women’s silk. ‘It is a privilege.’
Indeed, across the two sites on the outskirts of the city – the Bourgoin-Jallieu site to the south-east and the recently extended Pierre-Bénite closer to the centre – the process of creating a carré harks back to the accessory’s invention by Hermès family member Robert Dumas in 1937 and remains led by the artisan’s hand in the face of modernisation. Case in point, the scarf’s initial stage, the hand-inscription of the original design – patterns are commissioned from a series of notable artists and illustrators – into an image editing programme. Though the programme is digital, the team nonetheless painstakingly traces each brush or penstroke by hand using a drawing tablet and stylus in a process which takes on over 600 hours for each scarf’s design (several have taken far longer).
