The saddle stitch runs in two directions

The saddle stitch runs in two directions. Thread enters the leather, crosses beneath the surface, emerges on the opposite side. Then the second needle follows the same path backward. This is slower than a machine lock stitch. It is also permanent. If one thread breaks, the other holds. Hermès has used this method since 1837, when Thierry Hermès opened a harness workshop on rue Basse-du-Rempart. The stitch predates the bag, the scarf, the ready-to-wear, the perfume. It predates the idea that a harness-maker would need any of those things.

What the house understood early—perhaps before it articulated the principle—was that a world in motion requires objects built to endure that motion. Thierry Hermès made bridles and saddles for carriages in Paris, then for the European aristocracy, then for a client base that began to motorise in the early twentieth century. The horse became optional. The bridle became a bag. The proposition remained.

Founding: the harness as framework

Hermès did not begin as a luxury house. It began as a workshop with a technical mandate. Thierry Hermès's customers needed equipment that would not fail under use. Leather had to be cut on the bias in certain places to allow flex. Stitching had to be doubled. Hardware had to be forged, not cast, so it would not shatter under strain. These were not aesthetic choices. They were structural.

By the time Émile-Maurice Hermès took over in 1902, the automobile had made the horse optional for transport, but the house's technical vocabulary—its understanding of leather, of hand-stitching, of how a buckle distributes weight—remained intact. Émile-Maurice travelled to North America in 1918 and saw the zipper, which had been patented two decades earlier but was still largely industrial. He acquired the exclusive European rights to use it in leather goods and clothing. The Bolide, introduced in 1923, was the first handbag with a zipper closure. It was designed for the car, not the carriage. The name comes from the term for a racing car or a meteorite—something fast, something that enters the atmosphere and does not burn up.

Émile-Maurice also introduced the first Hermès handbag with a structured frame: the Haut à Courroies, a tall bag with straps, built to carry a saddle. It would later become the template for the Kelly and the Birkin, though those names would not arrive for decades. What mattered at the time was that Hermès had moved from equipping horses to equipping people, and the technical language remained consistent. A bag is a load-bearing object. It must close securely, distribute weight evenly, and open without fumbling. Elegance, in this framework, is a byproduct of solving the problem correctly.

Consolidation: the scarf, the Kelly, and the postwar proposition

The carré arrived in 1937, the house's centenary year. Silk twill, ninety centimetres square, hand-rolled edges, between twenty-seven and forty-three screens per print. Robert Dumas, Émile-Maurice's son-in-law, oversaw the early designs. The scarf was not an accessory in the sense of an afterthought. It was a canvas with edges, and those edges were finished with the same saddle stitch used on bridles.

By the 1950s, Hermès had developed a vocabulary that other houses studied but could not shortcut. The scarf became a signature, but so did the Kelly, renamed in 1955 after Grace Kelly carried one to shield her early pregnancy from photographers. The bag had existed since the 1930s as the Sac à Dépêches. The renaming was opportunistic, but the construction was not. Each Kelly required eighteen hours of work from a single artisan. The bag was stitched inside-out, then turned, so no raw edges showed. The handle was a single piece of leather, bevelled and reinforced where it met the frame. These details were not visible in a photograph, but they were legible in use.

What Hermès understood during this period—and what separated it from houses that grew through licensing and diffusion—was that scarcity is a structural outcome, not a marketing tactic. If a bag requires eighteen hours and the atelier has thirty artisans, production is capped by time and skill, not by strategy. The waiting list was not invented to create desire. It was the result of refusing to industrialise the saddle stitch.

Jean-Louis Dumas, who led the house from 1978 to 2006, reinforced this principle while expanding the catalogue. He introduced the Birkin in 1984 after a conversation with Jane Birkin on a flight from Paris to London. She had complained that her diary kept falling out of her bag. Dumas sketched a solution on the back of an airplane sick bag: a larger Kelly, with a more open top, no shoulder strap. The Birkin entered production the same year. It now accounts for a significant portion of Hermès's leather goods revenue, but it is still made one at a time, by hand, using the same stitch Thierry Hermès employed in 1837.

Current direction: Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski and the question of ready-to-wear

Hermès did not launch a women's ready-to-wear line until 1967. Men's came in 1970. For more than a century, the house made objects—bags, saddles, scarves—and left clothing to others. When it finally entered ready-to-wear, the approach was consistent with the harness: build for function, refine for longevity, avoid the seasonal churn that defines much of fashion.

Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski, who became artistic director of women's ready-to-wear in 2014, has worked within this framework without attempting to overturn it. Her collections are not manifesto-driven. They do not pivot sharply from one season to the next. A leather jacket from her second collection would not look out of place in her most recent one. This is sometimes read as conservatism, but it is more accurately a rejection of obsolescence as a business model.

Vanhee-Cybulski came from Céline, where she worked under Phoebe Philo during the house's most commercially successful period. At Hermès, she has leaned into fabric weight, seam placement, and the drape of a sleeve—elements that photographs flatten but that bodies register. A coat from her autumn 2022 collection used double-face cashmere with the seams placed so the garment could be reversed. The detail was noted in reviews, but it was not marketed as innovation. It was presented as a solution to the problem of a coat that works in multiple contexts.

Her shows are staged in spare environments—often the Mobilier National or a similar institutional space—with minimal set design. The clothes walk a circuit. There is no narrative arc, no conceptual throughline announced in the show notes. What you see is a series of garments built to move, to layer, to last. The palette is frequently earth-toned: camel, grey, rust, black. Prints, when they appear, reference the archive—the carré motifs, the equestrian heritage—but they are scaled and placed with restraint.

Where the house stands

Hermès reported revenue of €13.4 billion in 2023. Leather goods represent approximately half of that figure. The waiting list for a Birkin can extend years, depending on the region and the leather. The Kelly is similarly constrained. The scarf line has expanded to include home goods, but each carré is still screen-printed by hand in Lyon. The ready-to-wear grows incrementally, but it does not drive the business. What drives the business is the same thing that drove it in 1837: the willingness to let production be limited by the time it takes to do the work correctly.

This is not a romantic position. It is a structural one. Hermès owns its tanneries. It trains its artisans in-house, often for years before they are allowed to stitch a bag unsupervised. It does not license its name to eyewear conglomerates or fragrance holding companies—it makes its own perfume, in its own facility in Vaudreuil. The vertical integration is not about control for its own sake. It is about maintaining the conditions under which a saddle stitch remains a saddle stitch, and not a cost to be optimised away.

The house is still family-controlled, though it is publicly traded. Axel Dumas, Jean-Louis's nephew, has been chief executive since 2013. Under his leadership, Hermès has resisted the acquisition offers that have consolidated much of the luxury sector under three or four conglomerates. It has also resisted the strategy of rapid expansion—opening dozens of stores per year, flooding the market with entry-level products, building revenue through volume. Hermès opens stores slowly. It does not discount. It does not collaborate with streetwear brands to capture a younger demographic. It makes what it has always made, and it allows the customer to come to the house rather than reshaping the house to meet the customer halfway.

There is a room at the Hermès workshop in Pantin where artisans practice the saddle stitch on scrap leather before they are permitted to work on a bag. The stitch looks simple. Two needles, two threads, one path. But the tension has to be even, and the holes have to be spaced with absolute consistency, and the thread has to be waxed just enough to glide without slipping. It takes months to learn. It takes years to master. And once you have mastered it, you stitch the same way for the rest of your career, because the stitch does not improve with innovation. It improves with repetition.