Photo credit to Hermès
In the Spring/Summer of 2015, Hermès issued the "La Maison des Carrés". Pierre Marie, the artist who transformed the carré-making adventure into a miniature architectural model combining the Hermès Lyon silk atelier with the Hermès store, 24 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris France. The 2015 Hermès booklet has the following narrative: "In a joyful burst of colour, La Maison des Carrés tells the story of an adventure: how a silk scarf is made from the initial inspiration, through the dyeing and printing processes, to its arrival in store. Also to be spotted here is the cabinet of curiosities museum, the design studio – an incubator for talent that has inspired so many designs – and a whole host of people from this epic. Then there is the nerve centres: the final destinations of the legendary scarves destined to grace the necks, shoulders, waists or heads of their new owners!"
In the carré itself, the artist depicted the first Hermès store opened at 24 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré store in pairs in 1880, with smiling concierges at the main entrance. Since Hermès is one of the rare remaining private luxury houses in the world, like the investors and customers illustrated in the carré, some of you might be curious about the top high-end fashion brand's philosophy and their marketing strategy. The brand philosophy is deeply entrenched in its heritage root of creativity, quality and refinement. Hermès focuses on establishing long-term relationships with their customers and has an "Anti-Marketing" approach with no marketing department as the Hermès fans will always discover its merits. Good wine needs no bush.
Next to a roof that is made from the signature orange Hermès box, atop 24 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, a statue, affectionately known as "l'artificier," waving H carrés. Wispy white clouds drift through the blue sky, the epitome Hermès carrés designed by Pierre Marie himself flutter in the wind, from left to right, L'Ombrelle Magique, Dame De Coeur, Point d'Orgue, Le Laboratoire du Temps, L’Effet Domino, La Fabriques de Rubans, Cordages, Les Trophées, Ballet Aquatique, Sous L'Egide de Mars, Bouquets Sellier, Le Potager Extraordinaire.
Below the statue "l'artificier" is the artist's design studio where Hermès' carré designs evolved. It can take as long as a year to create and refine the design before submitting the final version to the Lyon silk atelier.
The colourists' team selects the colour schemes by using their artistic senses and based on the fashion colour trend of the year. There are 40 base colour collections in the Hermès colours library, enriched with pigments to create 75,000 shades. According to the artist's creation, the colourists propose ten or more colour schemes for each design every season and prepare the recipe for each hue.
The carré designer, Pierre Marie, transformed the rainbow into colouring tubes from the sky. The dyes are cooked and mixed by hand to ensure that the colours are correct before sending them to the printer.
An engraving workshop is a place where the engravers transposed the designs from paper onto silk. Each design is separated into films based on the colours. Over a lightbox, the well-trained engraver meticulously traces each colour on the different transparent films. It can take between 400 and 500 hours to engrave a scarf of 30 colours. Some designs can feature up to 46 colours, such as Wa'Ko-ni, which required 460 engraved frames to be produced in 10 different colourways.
After the silk twill rolls are unfurled and stretched over a 150-meters long table, the highly skilled printer operators laid the screens one by one on the silk twill. They impress colour onto the silk twill with the outline, starting from the smallest to the largest areas in the design, from lightest to darkest tones with a level of precision of less than a tenth of a millimetre. Thecarré designer Pierre Marie's latest creation, La Maison des Carrés, is under production in the screen printing workshop.
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