Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster (20 page)

The artisans in the Pantin workshop dress in aprons and white coats. Some wear earphones to listen to music on their iPods while they work. The workshop is perfectly silent except for the occasional tapping of a hammer or the short burst of stitching on a sewing machine. No one speaks. They just build bags. Even with a lot of practice, making an Hermès bag goes slowly. It takes fifteen to sixteen hours to make an average-size Birkin or Kelly. The bigger bags take twenty-five to thirty hours. In
2005
, Hermès’s twelve leather ateliers in France produced
130
,
000
handbags. Thanks to the waiting lists, Hermès didn’t suffer losses after the terrorist attacks of September
11
,
2001
, which caused one of the worst retail years in recent memory. In fact, sales went up. “After September
11
, a lot of people came in to buy that one special scarf or tie or bag,” Robert Chavez, CEO of Hermès’s American subsidiary in New York, told me. “They’d say, ‘I just want to have one special thing.’”

The first station in the atelier is the reptile skins table. Three or four men inspect the skins for defects and cut the shapes for the bags. All materials for Hermès bags are cut by press machines except for crocodile, alligator, and other reptile skins, which are extremely fragile and valuable. The artisans in the special-orders department work with three types of reptile skin: two crocodile and one alligator. The most delicate and expensive is from the
Crocodylus porosus
of Australia. It has square scales in the middle of the belly and four to five rows of small round scales down the side. There is
Crocodylus niloticus,
raised in Zimbabwe. It has bigger square scales in the middle and then two lines of big round scales down the side. The third is
Alligator mississippiensis,
which comes from a farm owned by Hermès in Florida. The alligator has small rectangular scales in the middle and smaller, oval-shaped ones down the side. It’s hard for amateurs to see the difference between
mississipiensis
and
porosus.
But there is a difference: in
2006
, a
porosus
crocodile thirty-two-centimeter Kelly retailed for $
19
,
600
; the same bag in alligator cost $
16
,
700
.

An average-size bag requires three skins. Like human fingers, each crocodile or alligator has its own print, so it takes time to find skins that go well together. Only the skin from the soft underside of the reptile is used, never the back, which is scarred and rough. The belly is used for the bag’s sides and flap, the underside of the tail, which has bigger scales, for the bottom or the side—or gusset. The skins are not varnished; to obtain their brilliant varnish-like shine, the artisan polishes the skins quickly with agate stone. As a result, the skin—and therefore the bag—is not water resistant. Large bags like a fifty-five-centimeter Birkin, which is the size of a suitcase, are rarely made in crocodile. “Crocodiles are not very kind animals,” explains one of the artisans, “so to find one so big and with no bite marks is unusual. You have to wait ten years for a skin like that.”

When I visited, one of the craftsmen was working with a ruby red crocodile skin, another with pine green. The men stand on spongy rubber mats—they’re on their feet all day—and lay the skin, which still retains the shape of the animal, across big white tables. Under natural light streaming through skylights, they inspect the skin and circle the defects with a white marker. All skins have defects that must be cut out. Cows have scars from wounds or mosquito bites that can’t be seen until the hide is tanned. “On crocodile and on light, bright colors you see everything,” one of the artisans explained. The piece he was working on had too many marks to use for the body or flap of a handbag. Perhaps, he said, they’d use it for a gusset.

The skin men cut all the forms for each bag and put the pieces into a plastic tray, along with zippers, locks, hardware, lining, leather string for piping—everything that is required to make the entire bag. The tray is handed off to a craftsperson who will build the bag from beginning to end. Each artisan works on three or four bags at a time—same model, same size, same material. One was working on a mini Kelly in black crocodile with a diamond clasp. Diamonds are always set in white gold and come with a certificate verifying the weight of the gold and the stones. In
2004
, the special-orders atelier made a ruby red Birkin with diamonds on the fittings for the Hermès store in Honolulu that sold for $
90
,
000
.

Most Hermès bags are built from the inside out. The first thing the artisan uses is a
griffe,
a handmade metal tool that looks like an Afro comb with very pointy tips. The
griffe,
which comes in several sizes, is pushed lightly along the edges of the leather to mark perfectly and evenly where the artisan will sew the seam by hand. Only the zipper and the inside pocket are sewn by machine. The artisan inserts a stiff piece of cowhide between the outer skin and the lining to give the bag strength and rigidity. Everything on the bag except the zipper is made of leather (unless of course it is a raffia or canvas bag). There are no unseen plastic reinforcements, no hidden canvas or plastic linings.

The Kelly comes in two styles:
sellier,
which means the seams are on the outside, and
retourner,
which means the seams are on the inside. The Birkin is only available
retourner.
The edges of
retourner
bags have piping, usually in the same color as the rest of the bag. The piping is made by wrapping a piece of leather cord with the skin, held together with a bit of glue. When it is all sewn together, there are eight layers of leather: the outer skin, the cowhide, and the lining on each side, plus the two edges of the piping. On the Kelly, the flap is a continuation of the back of bag. On the Birkin, it is sewn on.

The artisans sew all the leather seams by hand with a classic saddle stitch. The artisan takes two needles and one very long piece of thread, long enough to sew together all the pieces so that there are no knots on the bag. The linen thread, which comes from France, is break-resistant and doesn’t burn when pulled through the leather. It is waxed with beeswax to make it strong, waterproof, and smoothe. It always matches the leather, except when the skin is gold or natural, in which case white thread is used. The artisan holds the leather together with a long wooden clamp, leaving his two hands free. He pierces each
griffe
mark with an awl, making a hole through the several pieces of leather; sticks one needle through in one direction and the other through the other direction; tugs till the stitch is tight; and moves on to the next. The beginning and end of each seam has three double stitches so it doesn’t come apart. Once sewing is completed, the seams are tapped flat with a plastic hammer and the edges are shaved, sanded, and polished with wax until they are smooth and appear to be one single piece of leather. The handle is comprised of six pieces of leather and is shaped on the artisan’s thigh; each one takes about three and a half hours to make. “If the handle is not perfect,” said one artisan, “the bag is not perfect.”

When the inside and outside of the bag are complete, the artisan puts it all together and attaches the hardware. The hardware on most handbags today is attached with screws, but, as I was told by an Hermès artisan, screws come unscrewed. Hermès has a special method for attaching its hardware called pearling. The artisan puts the clasp on the front of the leather and a metal backing on the backside, sticks a nail from the back to the front through each corner hole, and clips off the length of the nail, leaving a tiny bit. He takes a special tool that looks like an awl but with a slight concave tip and taps the bit of nail gently in a circle until it is as round as a tiny pearl. Each piece of hardware has four pearls—one on each corner—and each is exactly the same shape. The pearls hold the two pieces of metal together forever. The hardware is then covered with clear plastic film to protect it from getting scratched. The artisan turns the bag right side out and irons it into shape. Ever-delicate crocodile is ironed scale by scale. The artisan runs a skinny hot iron between seams to clean as well as define and straighten the edge.

When the bag is finished, a supervisor inspects it to see if the stitching is balanced, the pearls are well done, the lock works, the shape is perfect, and the surface is unblemished. If the supervisor approves the bag, it is marked with a stamp that identifies the artisan, the year, and the workshop. On the Kelly, the stamp is on the leather buckle. The bag is placed in the house’s signature orange felt bag and sent to the logistics department, about fifteen minutes away in the suburb of Bobigny, to be inspected again. If it passes, it is wrapped in tissue paper, boxed, and sent to the store. Hermès wouldn’t tell me what they do with bags that don’t pass inspection.

I
N 2007
,
Hermès had
257
stores around the world, in cosmopolitan shopping districts, suburban shopping malls, five-star hotels, and international airports. But the loveliest by far is the original flagship at
24
, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, just steps off the Place de la Concorde in Paris. The two-floor store in the six-story company headquarters is a throwback to the late-nineteenth-century emporium: heavy black iron-and-glass doors, well-worn mosaic tile floors, highly polished oak sales counters topped with glass display cases, deco domed lighting. On the walls hang beautiful eighteenth-and nineteenth-century equestrian prints and paintings. Among them is a stunning
1727
portrait of King Louis XV astride a high-stepping steed, one of three by Jean-Baptiste van Loo and Charles Parrocel. Another hangs in the Louvre.

Walk in any time of day and the place is humming with activity. Slim chic saleswomen dramatically unfurl silk scarf after silk scarf for clusters of Japanese shoppers and elegant Parisiennes. Tailors take measurements for made-to-order suits, and millinery experts size up chapeaus to be worn at the next big wedding or horse race. On the mezzanine, jewelers fit watches or help select the perfect pair of cuff links. In the back, salesmen in the saddle department show off bridles, hacking jackets, and saddles, which, like Hermès handbags, are made to order and by hand. Hermès has made more than forty-three thousand saddles since its founding in
1837
. To be measured for one, customers make their way up the back stairs to the saddle atelier, where they straddle a leather sawhorse—just as clients have for more than a century—as one of the company’s eight saddlemakers, dressed in a worn cowhide apron, takes out his tape measure and gets to work. That, in a snapshot, is what sets Hermès apart from its competitors in the luxury business. As its
2004
fall ad campaign, shot by the late Richard Avedon, declared: “Nothing changes, but everything changes.”

In the center of the store is another staircase that leads to what Jean-Louis Dumas describes as the “soul of Hermès”: the former office of Dumas’s grandfather Émile-Maurice Hermès, which today serves as the Hermès museum. Open by appointment and curated by Hermès’s director of cultural heritage, Menehould de Bazelaire, the two-room museum is a veritable time machine that whisks visitors back a century to an epoch when one still traveled by horse, and life for the rich and noble was extremely refined. On the oak-paneled walls hang equestrian prints, carriage lanterns, silver spurs, leather crops, and harnesses, some decorated with royal coats of arms. Scattered about are hand-tooled saddles, trunks, toiletry cases, and a children’s carriage from the reign of Napoleon I. Today the museum serves as an inspiration for the company’s designers. For example, the gold-painted waves on a Japanese saddle were reproduced recently on a silk scarf.

De Bazelaire is a tall, thin, handsome woman—she reminded me a bit of Katharine Hepburn—and an educator at heart. She began her career teaching Greek and Latin at the Lycée Française in New York. In the
1980
s, she returned to Paris to become an archivist and was soon hired by Hermès to replace its retiring part-time museum curator. Today, overseeing a staff of fifteen, she is in charge of the house’s archives, documentation, conservation, and museum. On a freezing January night in
2006
, she welcomed me into the museum and told me all there is to know about the house of Hermès.

Thierry Hermès was born to Dietrich Hermès, an auberge owner, and his wife, Agnes, in Krefeld, a town on the left bank of the Rhine not far from Cologne. The region was French at the time, so Thierry, the youngest of six children, had French papers. The family was Protestant, a minority that had long been persecuted in Catholic Europe. This persecution, Jean-Louis Dumas has said, contributed to Hermès’s success in the luxury business: by keeping to themselves, the family learned to succeed as merchants.

Krefeld was on the road to Russia, and as a child, de Bazelaire explained, Thierry watched as Napoleon’s troops passed by full of pride on their way to Moscow and returned wounded and defeated. His oldest brother, Henri, a soldier in Napoleon’s army, was killed during battle in Spain in
1813
, and his parents and his four other siblings died of disease, leaving Thierry orphaned at fifteen. In
1821
, he walked with a Dutch friend to Paris. Thierry settled in Normandy, France’s horse country, to learn the harness-making trade, married, and had three children. In
1837
, he opened a harness workshop near the Madeleine in Paris. Five years later he moved around the corner to the boulevard des Capucines. Today it is the site of the Olympia theater. “It was a very cosmopolitan quarter,” de Bazelaire told me. “The cafés were filled with royals, courtesans, and demimondaines, like Marie Duplessis, the woman who inspired Alexandre Dumas’s
Camille,
and later Verdi’s
La Traviata.
She promenaded down Paris’s
grands boulevards
in a cabriolet carriage with Hermès harnesses.”