?????? 25.html???????????Archaic bearded head of Hermes from a herm, early 5th century BC.
In Roman and Renaissance versions (termini), the body was often shown from the waist up. The form was also used for portrait busts of famous public figures, especially writers like Socrates and Plato. Sappho appears on Ancient Greek herms, and anonymous female figures were often used from the Renaissance on, when herms were often attached to walls as decoration.n 415 BC, on a night shortly before the Athenian fleet was about to set sail for Syracuse during the Peloponnesian War (see Sicilian Expedition), all of the Athenian hermai were vandalized. This was a horribly impious act and many people believed it threatened the success of the expedition.[8] Though it was never proven, the Athenians at the time believed it was the work of saboteurs,Hermes Bag Quotes, either from Syracuse or Spartan sympathizers from Athens itself. Enemies of Alcibiades, using the anger of the Athenians as a pretext to investigate further desecrations, accused him of other acts of impiety, including mutilations of other sacred objects and mocking performances of religious mystery ceremonies.[9] He denied the accusations and offered to stand trial, but the Athenians did not want to disrupt the expedition any further, and his opponents wanted to use his absence to incite the people against him at a time when he would not be able to defend himself. Once he had left on the expedition, his political enemies had him charged and sentenced to death in absentia, both for the mutilation of the hermai, and the supposedly related crime of profaning the Eleusinian Mysteries.Almost two centuries ago, a royal coronation might be delayed until the arrival of its exquisitely stitched Hermès carriage fittings, just as today even the richest women must wait for an exquisitely stitched Hermès Birkin bag. With the family-run French company passing to a sixth generation, the author chronicles its rise to global pre-eminence, where a modern aesthetic meets the humble tools—awls, mallets, needles, knives, and stones—of unsurpassed tradition.The world is divided into two: those who know how to use tools, and those who do not."
"We are an industrial company with 12 divisions, which designs, makes, and retails its products. We aren't a holding company."
Atop 24 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré a statue, affectionately known as "l'artificier," waves Hermès scarves.
"We will continue to make things the way the grandfathers of our grandfathers did."
For 28 years, from 1978 to 2006, the most quotable voice in retail—pragmatic, poetic—came from Jean-Louis Dumas,Hermes Purses Birkin, the head of a company that in every other way speaks with its hands. It is an old company with a Protestant spine and a Parisian perfectionism, one of the oldest family-owned-and-controlled companies in France. Its name alone prompts sighs of desire among those in the know, and those in the know run the gamut from French housewife to fashionista to queen (both kinds), from social climber to Olympic equestrian to C.E.O. The name itself is a sigh, a flight, and its proper pronunciation must often be taught. "Air-mez"—as in the messenger god with winged sandals. Mischievous, witty, ingenious Hermès.
"We don't have a policy of image, we have a policy of product."
Dumas, fifth generation of the Hermès family, was eminently quotable because he expressed clear concepts that made sense in any language. Though Hermès is grouped with other luxury brands, it hovers ineffably higher, apart, and not only because it is more costly. Dumas himself pooh-poohed the term "luxury," disliking its arrogance, its hint of decadence. He preferred the word "refinement," and intrinsic to that refinement is what Hermès won't do. It does not boast, does not use celebrities in advertising, does not license its name, does not let imperfect work leave the atelier (imperfect work is destroyed), does not get its head turned by trends. What it does do—Dumas's "policy of product"—is create necessary objects made from the most beautiful materials on earth, each so intelligently designed and deeply well made it transcends fashion (which is good because the pieces last for generations). When Diane Johnson, in her best-seller of 1997, Le Divorce, describes a gift box from Hermès "set alluringly on the desk, like a cake on an altar," she catches that special blend of the senses and the soul inherent in an object from Hermès.
&quot,Hermes Neckties;Time is our greatest weapon."
Inside that gift box is an Hermès handbag, a Kelly, the company classic renamed in 1956 for the actress Grace Kelly, who used one to shield her pregnancy from a paparazzo's lens. In Johnson's novel the Kelly is symbolic of an Old World transaction—the taking of a mistress. But under Dumas's brilliant leadership, Hermès became a brave-new-world company, growing global in a sustained, savvy, relatively debt-free ascent that was prepared for in the 80s, rocketed in the 90s, and continued to climb after 2000 even as other luxury brands slipped. Young women in Japan, China, and Russia now buy their own Kellys. Paris is no longer the only destination for those who want incomparable leather goods, scarves, ties, and iconic jewelry and watches—Hermès now has 283 stores worldwide, 4 of them flagships. Dumas set the tone for Hermès as a fierce competitor that competes only with itself and keeps winning. Upon his retirement, in March of last year, he handed the reins to members of the family's sixth generation, who must now find their own relationship with time.
It began with Thierry Hermès, the sixth child of an innkeeper. He was born a French citizen in the German town of Krefeld, land that in 1801 was part of Napoleon's empire. Having lost all of his family to disease and war, Hermès went to Paris an orphan, proved gifted in leatherwork,Hermes Outlet Online, and opened a shop in 1837, the same year Charles Lewis Tiffany opened his doors in New York. Today the two companies have the most distinctive color signatures in retail—Hermès orange and Tiffany robin's-egg blue—but there the similarity ends. Where Tiffany began in stationery and costume jewelry, Hermès specialized in the horse harnesses required by society traps, calèches, and carriages. The dynamics of animal power and grace, movement and travel, energy controlled and the outdoors enjoyed, are deep in the lifeline of Hermès. It was a business built on the strength of a stitch that can only be done by hand, the saddle stitch, which has two needles working two waxed linen threads in tensile opposition. It is a handsome, graphic stitch, and done properly it will never come loose.
Saddle master Laurent Goblet and one of his craftsmen flank their handiwork.
The clients of Thierry Hermès were rich: the Parisian beau monde and European royalty, including the emperor Napoléon III and his empress, Eugénie. But Thierry's true client—the wings on his sandals—was the horse, whose hauteur in this era was unrivaled. It was in equipage that the Hermès allure took form, born of a linear integrity, a tailored masculinity, its richness lying in the leather and in hardware honestly, elegantly designed. When Thierry's son, émile-Charles, succeeded him, the family business moved to 24 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where it has been a limestone landmark—the home of Hermès—ever since. In that same year of 1880, saddlery was added, a custom business that required measurements from both horse and rider. Added as well in the 19th century,Wallet Hermes, another Hermès institution: the wait. Because handstitched perfection cannot be rushed, royal coronations were sometimes delayed until Hermès fittings for the carriage and the guard had arrived. In this century,Hermes Bags Canada, the waitlist for items such as the hot-and-heavy Birkin, a handbag created in 1984 for the actress Jane Birkin, can stretch to five years. One Birkin takes 18 to 25 hours to make, and the Paris workrooms produce only five or so each week; these supply Hermès stores worldwide.
In the third generation of Hermès, when émile-Charles's sons, Adolphe and émile-Maurice, succeeded him, lightning struck. Hermès Frères, as it was then called, was peerless in its field, adding Czar Nicholas II of Russia to its client list, along with royals and riders from around the world. Nevertheless, the century had turned and the centrality of the horse was diminishing. Elder brother Adolphe, shy and fearful of this epochal change, thought there was no future for Hermès in the age of the motor. émile-Maurice, adventurous and inspired, thought otherwise.
"My grandfather," says Jér?me Guerrand, the chairman of the Hermès supervisory board and a cousin of Jean-Louis Dumas's, "during the war was sent as an officer to the States, and he met [Henry] Ford. At that time it was the best example for factories in the world. And in Canada he found a kind of zip, for the [canvas] roof of the cars. He thought it was something he could use in France—to make other things."
Perhaps only a man named for the Greek god of swiftness would perceive the future in this quicksilver device. émile-Maurice returned to Paris with a two-year European patent on the zipper. He saw Hermès zooming into the age of the automobile, which would no doubt require leather accessories. The zipper opened and closed in a flash, a perfect mechanism with which to secure a purse or jacket against high speeds. The "Hermès Fastener," as it was called even after the patent had expired, would revolutionize clothing (made by Hermès, the first-ever leather jacket with a zip was worn by the Duke of Windsor), and the Hermès workrooms became so expert in its manipulation that other companies, including Coco Chanel's, came to learn from them.
That zipper—not flat like today's, more like a skinny, silver snake skeleton—lies in a desk drawer in the hushed and beautiful room that was once émile-Maurice's office and is now another of his legacies, the Hermès Museum. Secreted away on a floor above the store, the museum is a long rectangular room with old oak walls, windows curtained in moss-green velvet, and the dust-mote magic of another world. From the age of 12, when he bought his first piece, a walking stick, émile-Maurice was an avid collector, and in this room he housed his treasures. His focus was the golden age of the horse, which spanned many centuries and even more cultures.
Bejeweled saddles for Eastern warriors and Russian leather for Western kings, stirrups forged in Peru, bridles from Africa and India. In this room there are phaetons and victorias made as tiny as toys, or scaled as salesman's models. A galloping horse on tricycle wheels, its horsehair face worn bald by too many kisses, belonged to Napoléon III's son, the Prince Imperial. (General George Patton's signature is in the museum guest book.) And a royal carriage on a table, created from paper slips rolled between finger and thumb—the art of paperole—is a masterpiece probably made by a nun. (Andy Warhol also visited the museum.) The severe black wool sidesaddle suit—or amazone—of Julie Hermès, émile-Maurice's wife, recently served as inspiration for the Miss Julie–esque costuming of Madonna's Confessions tour. And if the collection's parasol made of pheasant feathers hadn't been so fragile, it would have taken part in Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. Coppola did have use of an 18th-century hunting knife and a ray-skin spyglass called an indiscrète, which were accompanied to the set by Ménéhould de Bazelaire, the museum's curator since 1986."Ali Baba's cavern," "Gepetto's workshop"—these are ways de Bazelaire describes the collection. "In this room, the childhood spirit of Hermès is gathered. Not to be a prisoner of the past, not at all. Every time an artist, a designer for Hermès, comes here, they are excited. They feel energy from the craftsmanship."

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