## The Saddle, the Stitch, and What Lasts

The Saddle, the Stitch, and What Lasts

Thierry Hermès opened his workshop at 24 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in 1837. He made harnesses. Not bags, not scarves, not the kind of belt that now costs what a month's rent used to. Harnesses. Collars. Bridles. The sort of leather goods a coachman might commission for a duc's carriage, stitched by hand with linen thread and beeswax.

The shop was small. Paris was not yet the Paris of department stores and electric light. Hermès worked alone at first, then with a few apprentices, cutting and saddle-stitching in a trade that had been more or less unchanged since the Middle Ages. What set him apart was not innovation but consistency. His harnesses did not crack in winter or loosen in summer. The stitching held. Customers returned.

By the time Thierry died in 1878, his son Charles-Émile had taken over and begun to expand. The house supplied the Russian imperial court, the Austro-Hungarian cavalry, assorted European aristocrats with stables to fill. Charles-Émile introduced the first ready-made harnesses — a concession to scale, though each piece was still hand-finished. He also began to think about what would happen when the horse became optional.

The Automobile Problem

Émile-Maurice Hermès, Charles-Émile's son, saw the future in 1900 at the Exposition Universelle. Not in the Grand Palais or the Eiffel Tower, but in the automotive pavilion, where Panhard and Daimler were showing engines that would, within two decades, render the family business obsolete.

He did not panic. He pivoted. If carriages were dying, the people who had owned them were not. They would still need luggage, gloves, cases for their new motorcars. Émile-Maurice began designing travel trunks, then handbags, then small leather goods that required the same saddle-stitch his grandfather had used on bridles. The téchnique remained. The application changed.

In 1922, he introduced a leather golf jacket with a zip — one of the first uses of the zipper in high-end clothing. He had discovered the fastening in Canada and saw its potential for sportswear, another new category for a house that had never made clothing. The jacket sold. More importantly, it proved that Hermès could move into adjacent markets without losing the plot.

Émile-Maurice also secured the rights to the zipper for France, which meant that for years, any French couturier who wanted a fermeture éclair had to buy it from a saddler.

What Holds

The saddle-stitch is the house's structural anchor. Two needles, one thread, each stitch locked by the one before it. If the thread breaks, the seam does not unravel. This is not romantic. It is mechanical fact. A machine-sewn seam uses a single thread looped through itself; cut it anywhere and the whole thing comes apart.

Hermès still uses the saddle-stitch on every bag. Each artisan works one piece from start to finish, a system that is slower and more expensive than an assembly line but allows for repair. A Kelly bag stitched in 1960 can be re-stitched in 2025 with the same method, the same linen thread, often by someone trained in the same workshop.

The house does not advertise this. It simply continues.

The Bag That Was Not Meant to Be a Bag

In 1935, Hermès made a small leather holdall with a saddle-stitched frame and two handles. It was meant for carrying a saddle. Robert Dumas, Émile-Maurice's son-in-law, refined the design in the 1950s, adding a shoulder strap and a structured base. It became the Kelly, named after Grace Kelly, who used one to shield her early pregnancy from photographers in 1956.

The Birkin came later, in 1984, after Jean-Louis Dumas — Robert's son, and by then the house's chairman — sat next to Jane Birkin on a flight from Paris to London. She complained that she could not find a leather weekend bag that was both practical and elegant. Dumas sketched one on an air-sickness bag. The first prototype was ready within the year.

Neither bag was invented to be an icon. Both were solutions to specific problems, made with the same construction Thierry Hermès had used on bridles. The waiting list came later.

What Remains, What Doesn't

Hermès is still controlled by the family. Axel Dumas, sixth generation, is the current chairman. The house has resisted acquisition, buyout, and the kind of conglomerate logic that would have turned it into a diffusion-line engine decades ago.

It still operates its own tanneries. It still trains artisans in-house, a process that takes two years before they are allowed to work unsupervised. It still limits production of its most famous bags, not as a marketing tactic but because there are only so many people who can saddle-stitch to standard.

This is not to say the house is frozen. Nadège Vanhée-Cybulski has been creative director of women's ready-to-wear since 2014, and her work is quiet in the way Hermès has always been quiet — no logos, no slogans, no embroidery that announces itself. Véronique Nichanian has led menswear since 1988, longer than most designers stay anywhere. The clothes do not look like 1988. They do not look like 2025 either. They look like cloth cut well and left alone.

The scarves continue. The house has produced more than 2,000 designs since 1937, each one still screen-printed by hand in the atelier near Lyon. A single carré requires up to forty-three separate screens. The process has not changed.

The Test

There is a kind of brand that survives by becoming louder. Hermès has survived by becoming quieter. The orange box is smaller than it used to be. The logo is often absent. The waiting list for a Birkin is real, but it is not a queue you can join — it is a relationship with a sales associate, built over years, that may or may not result in an offer.

This is irritating if you want to buy a bag. It is effective if you want the bag to mean something in thirty years.

The house's test is not whether it can stay relevant. It is whether it can stay the same while everything around it accelerates. So far, it has. The saddle-stitch still holds. The atelier still trains. The family still owns the business.

Thierry Hermès made harnesses because people needed harnesses. His descendants make bags because people need bags. The logic has not changed. Neither has the thread.