Hermès:
IN THE MAKING

In the beginning, there were two silkworm moths. Hundreds of cocoons. Miles of thread. And one simple accessory that would become synonymous with effortless elegance: le carré.

As told by Hermès, the story surrounding the creation of its legendary silk scarves is not unlike a foundational myth—the start of an epic love story built around a fiber so noble it once caused wars and gave its name to history’s most famous trade route. Indeed, although the French luxury house was originally founded as a harness workshop in 1837, its iconic 35.5-inch square silk scarves have been at the heart of its business for nearly a century.

Hermès’ own silk route currently starts in Brazil, in the region of Paraná, where a community of third-generation silkworm farmers are based. Once the cocoons arrive in France for the manufacturing process, the city of Lyon takes center stage. Lyon became the epicenter of Europe’s silk industry 500 years ago, when King Francis I granted the city’s residents a monopoly over the fabric’s production and trade. Lyon and its surroundings were naturally where Émile Hermès, grandson of founder Thierry Hermès, set his sights when he decided to include twill scarves in the house’s catalog, using a style of silk weave then mainly found on jockeys’ jackets. 

Until the 1920s, the harness-maker’s main clients had been horse and carriage owners, but as automobiles started taking over the streets of Paris, the family business had to diversify its offerings, venturing into leather goods, clothing and jewelry. At the time, Émile had decided to launch a scarf department, naming his son-in-law, Robert Dumas, as artistic director. Dumas, whose dreams of becoming an architect had been shelved due to World War I, brought a more creative eye to the house. It was his idea to design the drawings for the scarves in-house rather than buying them ready-made from silk printers. That’s how, in 1937, on the house’s centennial, the first Hermès-designed carré came to be. Jeu des omnibus et dames blanches referenced a popular 19th-century board game, with players pictured at the center, horse-drawn carriages appearing on the outer edges, and a cheeky inscription: “A good player never loses their temper.”

Hermès uses a traditional flat screen-printing technique from Lyon, referred to in France as méthode lyonnaise.

Manufacturing the carré was, and remains, a stringent process. Once the design is approved by Pierre-Alexis Dumas, the group’s artistic director and grandson of Robert Dumas, each drawing is turned into engravings and broken down further into printing screens, each matching one color from the scarf’s pattern. After the colors are printed one by one onto the silk, the fabric must be dried, the hems rolled by hand and the garment checked for quality. A decade after the first carré was put on sale, Robert Dumas began working with two partners whose unique skill set has stood the test of time: printer Atelier AS, and textile engraver Établissement Marcel Gandit, both based in the commune of Bourgoin-Jallieu on the outskirts of Lyon. Today, the two companies continue to be central to the scarf-printing process for his grandson. They are among the eight companies that make up HTH, the group’s textile division, which employs ar-ound 850 people in the Rhône-Alpes region.

Greeting artisans by name, Kamel Hamadou, head of communications at HTH, guides me through the different stages of carré-making at the Lyon atelier, highlighting the level of craftsmanship required in each position. On average, a twill square contains between 25 to 30 colors, and often counts up to 48. As we walk past seamstresses working on tigress-illustrated scarves, he points out the four shades of blue in the animal’s eye: That’s four separate printing screens needed for the pupil alone. On a different floor, we meet the graphic designers scanning illustrations to deconstruct each color pattern into templates—the shapes then reproduced onto the printing screens. Depending on the level of detail of a given drawing, that step alone can take up to 800 hours. “For us, real luxury is time,” Hamadou says. “If you add up the time needed for each step, we’re looking at two years to give life to a carré.”

The concept of luxury is a debatable one at Hermès. The Parisian house labels itself a “house of quality,” rather than a “house of luxury.” While everyone has their own definition of the latter, the former is objective, Hamadou muses: Quality is either there or not.   

“For us, real luxury is time.
If you add up the time needed,
we’re looking at two years to
give life to a carré.”

In the 2000s, as other designers had sworn off prints entirely, Pierre-Alexis Dumas and Bali Barret, the former artistic director of the Hermès women’s universe, brought modernity to the carré, bringing in colorful streetwear references and breaking the bourgeois mold. Hermès has always adapted to meet the moment, but has never followed industrial revolutions blindly. Historically, as harness makers, their first concern was to make sure clients would never have an accident, and that their products could be repaired. Today, all Hermès creations are still subject to repair.

That human-first philosophy also permeates the culture at the Lyon ateliers. Though much of the printing process has become automated over time, machines are there to help artisans, not the other way around, Hamadou explains. Colorists, whose job is to design new colors (the Hermès chart boasts 75,000 different shades) and dream up new combinations, use technology to virtually mix tints together, but it’s thanks to their expertise that the correct recipe lands in the workshop’s color “kitchen.” Printing is an elaborate dance between machine-operated screens and humans gauging just how much color needs to be poured at any given time. And at the end of the production line, the squares are always folded by hand.

The story of the carré may have started due to industrialization, but it is a tale of human craft at every stage. “Paris looks after the artistic side, we handle the manufacturing process from the thread to the finished carré, and Hermès also oversees the distribution,” explains Hamadou. “It’s a singular economic model.” This incorporated system fosters a unique relationship between employees and the company, he adds: For him, working with silk is truly a labor of love.

Once printed, the hem of each scarf must be hand-rolled. The technique requires flawless printing and stitching.