Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster (21 page)

In
1859
, Thierry retired to Normandy and turned the company over to his second son, Charles-Émile. By then, Charles-Émile had married and had four children, including Émile-Maurice. The horse transportation business was booming: in the
1860
s, there were ninety thousand horses in the streets of Paris. Charles-Émile invented harnesses that protected both horses and passengers, such as on that stopped horses from bolting. In
1880
, he moved the business to a pretty two-story building at
24
, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, near the Champs-Élysées and the Bois de Boulogne, which, de Bazelaire noted, “was the noble horse country back then.” The shop was on the ground floor, the ateliers on the first floor, and the oldest son, Adolphe, lived in the converted attic, where the museum is now located. Charles-Émile expanded the business by adding ateliers to produce saddles and jockey racing silks. In
1902
, a sports newspaper writer described Hermès as “the great horse bazaar in Paris.”

The dawning of the twentieth century was, as for Louis Vuitton, the turning point for Hermès. In
1902
, Charles-Émile’s sons, Émile-Maurice and Adolphe, took over the business. Émile-Maurice spoke English very well and was a globetrotter long before it was fashionable. Following a trip to Argentina, where he saw gauchos carrying their saddles in big satchels, he came up with Hermès’s
haut à courroies
saddlebag. He traveled to Russia and secured an order to produce harnesses and saddles for Czar Nicholas II. During World War I, he went to the United States and Canada and saw a new invention called the zipper. He secured the patent for Europe from
1922
to
1924
and integrated it into Hermès designs, such as the
sac pour l’auto,
known now as the Bolide. He remodeled the building, adding four floors, converting the old attic into his office, and turning the southwest corner of the ground floor into a big display window.

With the help of friends Louis Renault (the cofounder of automaker Renault), and Ettore Bugatti (the revolutionary Italian carmaker), Émile-Maurice introduced products for the automobile such as trunks that fit on the back of a Bugatti and leather wallets for maps. He enlisted contemporary artists Jean-Michel Frank, the Giacometti brothers, and Sonia Delaunay to design products; developed new lines such as couture and belts; and expanded the retail network to such fashionable French holiday resorts as Deauville, Biarritz, and Cannes. The Cannes boutique makes an appearance in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
Tender Is the Night
when Nicole Diver buys “two chamois leather jackets of kingfisher blue and burning bush from Hermès.”

In the late
1930
s, Émile-Maurice bought Mi Colline, a villa in the hills above Cannes, not far from the Croisette shop. During the Nazi Occupation of Paris, most of the family fled to Mi Colline. The Hermès store on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré shut down for four days and then reopened to keep the employees working and receiving wages, however small. Émile-Maurice’s son-in-law Jean Guerrand took over the store and distributed potato soup to the workers because, de Bazelaire said, “everyone was starving.” As in many stores that remained open during the Occupation, there were often signs in the Hermès windows reading, “Nothing for Sale,” due to shortages not only of materials but also the will to sell to Nazis. General Hermann Göring ordered a big picnic trunk from Hermès, but there was no leather and no motivation, and it was never produced. Paper, cardboard, and other sorts of packaging were scarce as well; the only color available was vibrant orange. Hermès used it for boxes and bags. Almost overnight, it became the house’s signature color.

In
1945
, Émile-Maurice adopted the company logo based on a drawing by nineteenth-century artist Alfred de Dreux of a groom standing before a horse and open carriage. The picture still hangs behind his desk in the museum. A few years later, he introduced silk neckties and the house’s first scent, Eau d’Hermès, which is still a staple at the house. In
1951
, the eighty-year-old Émile-Maurice died of a stroke and his son-in-law Robert Dumas took over. With the help of Guerrand, Dumas focused on the burgeoning jet set. It was Dumas who decided to rename the
haut à courroies
the Kelly after Princess Grace of Monaco—formerly Grace Kelly—was photographed carrying it to conceal her pregnancy. Half a century later, the Kelly remains one of the most popular items at Hermès.

Most important, though, Robert Dumas groomed his son Jean-Louis to lead the company into the twenty-first century. Jean-Louis Dumas is what the French call
un grand monsieur:
well educated, distinguished, and charming. As he likes to point out, “Oscar Wilde said elegance is power.” By the time he was born—in
1938
, the fourth of Robert’s six children—the Dumas family not only sold leather goods to the right sort, they
were
the right sort. He attended Lycée Franklin, a preppy Jesuit school in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, and went on to France’s prestigious Paris Institute of Political Science in the Quartier Latin, where he took degrees in politics and economics. Like his grandfather Émile-Maurice, he traveled extensively. In the early
1960
s, he and his Greek-born wife, Rena, climbed into a beat-up Citröen and drove down the Silk Road to India. Dumas has said that the trip opened his eyes to vast gulf between rich and poor and gave him a sense of spiritualism that he would use later to guide the company.

In
1963
, Jean-Louis was sent by his father to work as an assistant buyer for Bloomingdale’s in New York to learn the fashion retail trade. A year later, he joined the family business as a consultant, “an ideas man,” de Bazelaire explained. The
1970
s were a quiet, rambling time for Hermès. Luxury was next to dead. The oil crisis, the economic recession, and high unemployment dried up spending. To make matters worse, Robert Dumas didn’t push the company like his father-in-law, Émile-Maurice, had. “Robert was very discreet, from a generation where you didn’t hawk your wares, you didn’t sell per se,” de Bazelaire explained. Instead, you waited for the good, regular customers to come in and buy. And they didn’t. Sales were so slow one year that the company was forced to shut down the ateliers for two weeks.

In
1976
, the company received an unexpected boost from fashion photographer Helmut Newton, known as the “King of Kink” for his sexually powerful pictures. Newton adored Hermès. He found the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré store to be “the most expensive and luxurious sex shop in the world,” he wrote in his autobiography. “In its glass cases there were displayed great collections of spurs, whips, leather ware, and saddles. The salesladies were dressed like strict teachers, in wraparound gray flannel skirts, blouses closed to the neck, and a brooch in the shape of a riding crop pinned to their bosoms.” Newton paid homage to Hermès by shooting a portfolio featuring its products at the Hôtel Raphael in Paris for
Vogue.
And what pictures they were. The most famous is of a model on all fours on a bed, with a saddle on her back, while dressed in tight jodhpurs, shiny black leather riding boots with silver spurs, and a black lace scoop bra. “After seeing the
Vogue
pages, [Robert Dumas] succumbed to a malaise,” Newton recalled. “Happily,” Newton added, “he recovered.”

When Robert Dumas died two years later from illness, the board unanimously elected Jean-Louis as chairman. With the help of his cousins Patrick Guerrand and Bertrand Puech, Dumas got the company back in shape. He reinvigorated the silk scarf business by hiring artists to make dazzling new designs and by having salesclerks show customers creative new ways to wear them: as a belt, as a halter top, or simply tied to a handbag for a splash of color. He hired an outside firm to do ad campaigns—a first for the house—and expanded the press office, which at the time had one person for the entire company. (By
2006
, there were sixteen press attachés in Paris alone.) In
1980
, he hired nineteen-year-old designer Eric Bergère just out of fashion school to liven up the staid women’s wear line. And then he decided to revitalize the handbag division.

T
HROUGHOUT
the centuries, men and women have carried their belongings in some sort of bag. When the five-thousand-year-old remains of a man, known as “Frozen Fritz,” were found in the ice of the Tyrolean Alps in
1991
, researchers discovered that sewn onto his calfskin belt was a pouch containing small tools made of stone, lime wood, bone, and horn. In Greece, schoolchildren kept their knucklebone games in bags. In Rome, women carried small net pouches called
reticula,
and they were ridiculed for carrying their pockets in their hands. In the Middle Ages, there were drawstring alms purses. In China, Buddhist monks and pilgrims carried small pouches of amulets and icons. African medicine men kept their divining ossicles in pouches, and nomads throughout the world used bags to transport their possessions on the backs of their camels and horses. During the late eighteenth century, European women wore diaphanous high-waisted dresses without pockets and carried their essentials in small sacks that are now considered the forebears to the handbag. In the late nineteenth century, when sewing and embroidery were social activities, ladies of the upper classes had ornate sewing bags to carry their needles and thread. Carrying anything more than that was seen as socially inferior: that’s why one had staff.

The modern handbag was born in the early twentieth century with the emergence of suffragettes. The handbag was “the sign of a new independence, that of coming and going at will, of being able to leave home without answering to anyone,” writes Farid Chenoune in
Carried Away: All About Bags.
The handbag quickly became an essential accessory for the average consumer. “It’s so infuriating, this lack of pockets in skirts that are too close-fitting,” wrote one observer in
Fémina
magazine back in
1908
. “All the precious things you lose—purse, notebook, handkerchief—that you end up resigned to the handbag, day and night. Wealthy women are still holding out—they can put all their bits and pieces in the car; but the others have made up their minds and the current thing is the handbag.” With the arrival of the slim “flapper” silhouette, handbags became an essential fashion accessory. In the
1930
s, couturiers began to quietly replace their customers’ initials with their own, thus launching the practice of displaying luxury brand logos.

By the time Diana Vreeland joined
Harper’s Bazaar
in
1937
as a junior editor, handbags had become an integral and important part of the fashion business, as she would quickly learn. Shortly after she arrived at the august glossy, Vreeland had what she described in her memoir,
D.V.
, as a “brainwave!”

“We’re going to eliminate all handbags,” she told a colleague.

“You’re going to
what
?” he responded.

“Eliminate all handbags,” she repeated. “Now look. What have I got here? I’ve got cigarettes, I’ve got my lipstick, I’ve got my comb, I’ve got my powder, I’ve got my rouge, I’ve got my money. But what do I want with a bloody old handbag that one leaves in taxis and so on? It should all go into pockets. Real pockets, like a man has, for goodness sake.”

Then Vreeland explained how she wanted to devote an entire issue of the venerable fashion magazine to “showing what you can do with pockets and how the silhouette is improved and so on.”

Her colleague ran from her office—“the way you run for the police!” she recalled—straight to
Harper’s Bazaar
editor Carmel Snow.

“Diana’s going crazy!” he cried. “Get hold of her.”

Snow went to see Vreeland.

“Listen, Diana,” Snow told Vreeland, “I think you’ve lost your mind. Do you realize that our income from handbag advertising is God knows how many millions a year?!”

During World War II, handbags became simple and practical, like the leather backpack and the “game bag,” a largish sac worn across the torso so that one could ride a bicycle easily, the preferred method of transportation during gasoline rationing. After the war, designers embraced an array of interesting new materials such as plastic, Plexiglass, raffia, and straw. In
1947
, Gucci introduced a spare U-shaped handbag made of gleaming black cowhide with a handle made of bamboo, a material that was cheap and abundant. In February
1955
, Chanel launched its now-iconic
2
.
55
(named for the launch date), the rectangle-shaped quilted leather bag with a fold-over flap and gold-chain shoulder strap. It had no monogram; the interlocking Cs were sewn inside. Not long after, the Kelly came into vogue, thanks to Princess Grace.

During the feminist movement of the late
1960
s, all the accessories that for centuries had been essential items in a woman’s wardrobe—the hat, the parasol, the gloves, the muff—disappeared. All that remained was the baby of the lot, the handbag, and it moved up the arm to the shoulder, freeing up a woman’s hands as she liberated her mind and her soul. “We’ve got into the habit of using just one bag right around the clock,” reported the French fashion magazine
Jardins des Modes.
“No more changing the color to go with the clothes, no more matching sets—bag, gloves, shoes, and so on. You fine-tune your bag with what you’re wearing by adjusting the length of the strap.”

As women joined the workforce in droves in the
1980
s, they found they needed a bag that could go from day to evening and could work as a briefcase, too—and they had the disposable income to spend to get a good one. They needed something classic, something that wasn’t too flashy, that wouldn’t undermine their desire to be taken seriously in a man’s world. And since a good leather handbag was a hefty investment, women preferred a design that wouldn’t go out of fashion too quickly.