The saddle sits in a vitrine on the sixth floor of 24 Faubourg Saint-Antoine

The saddle sits in a vitrine on the sixth floor of 24 Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Stitched in 1837, the leather is still taut. The thread count has not changed. Hermès began here, making harnesses for carriage horses, and the company still measures quality by whether a stitch would hold under the weight of a moving animal.

That standard never shifted. The product line did.

Leather and locomotion

Thierry Hermès opened his atelier during the last decades of horse-drawn Paris. He made bridles, saddles, and harness fittings for European nobility. The work required structural integrity — a failed girth could kill a rider — and it required discretion. Hermès equipment did not announce itself. The house mark was a small embossed logo, legible only to those who knew where to look.

By the early twentieth century, the automobile had replaced the carriage. Émile-Maurice Hermès, grandson of the founder, saw the shift and responded without panic. He had travelled to North America and studied zipper mechanics and tanning processes that French ateliers had not yet adopted. In 1922, he introduced leather goods for a motorised world: small luggage, handbags with structured frames, a zip-top case designed to hold a saddle during transport by car.

The Sac à dépêches arrived in 1935. It was a tall bag with a trapezoidal body and two straps that folded over the top, fastened by a leather-wrapped buckle. Hermès designed it to carry documents for riders commuting between stable and office. The bag had no logo on the exterior. Thirty years later, after Grace Kelly held one in front of her pregnant stomach to avoid photographers, it became the Kelly. Hermès did not pursue that association. The name was given by the press, and the house eventually adopted it because clients were already using it.

This is consistent with how Hermès operates. The house does not court celebrity. It courts use.

The square and the waiting list

In 1937, Robert Dumas — Émile-Maurice's son-in-law — began designing silk scarves. He had trained as an artist and understood textile as a surface for composition. The first carré measured ninety centimetres square, printed with a woodblock pattern called Jeu des Omnibus et Dames Blanches. It depicted a nineteenth-century board game. The imagery was archival, specific, and required sixteen colours to print.

Hermès released two scarf designs per year until the 1960s, then increased output as demand grew. By 1987, the catalogue included over one thousand patterns. Each scarf still requires a separate screen for each colour. A thirty-colour design means thirty screens, thirty passes. Hermès has not moved this process to digital printing. The house considers the hand-pulled screen an irreducible part of the object.

The Birkin entered production in 1984, after a conversation between Jean-Louis Dumas — Robert's son and then-CEO — and Jane Birkin on an Air France flight. Birkin's diary and papers had spilled from her bag. She complained that no weekend bag had both capacity and structure. Dumas sketched a prototype on the back of an airsickness bag. The Birkin is larger than the Kelly, with an open top and two rolled handles. It holds weight without collapsing.

The bag was not marketed. Hermès does not advertise the Birkin in print. There is no campaign. The house produces a limited number each year, and the waitlist is managed at the boutique level, often linked to purchase history. This is not artificial scarcity. Hermès cannot produce Birkins faster without adding ateliers or diluting training standards. Each bag is made by a single artisan over eighteen hours. The artisan's mark is stamped inside.

Demand has consistently outpaced supply for forty years.

Nadège Vanhée-Cybulski and the question of restraint

When Nadège Vanhée-Cybulski was appointed creative director of women's ready-to-wear in 2014, she inherited a house that had never prioritised runway spectacle. Hermès shows are quiet. The set is often a single colour. Models walk at a measured pace. There is no finale walk, no music crescendo.

Vanhée-Cybulski's first collection for spring 2015 featured leather trousers with a clean front and an invisible zip, cotton shirting with a slightly dropped shoulder, and a trench coat in double-face cashmere that weighed almost nothing. The pieces were not minimal. They had seams, darts, topstitching. But every detail served a structural purpose. The silhouette was easy in the way that requires precision.

She has continued in that direction. Her autumn 2022 collection included a blouson in lambskin so fine it moved like jersey, and a pair of wide-leg trousers with a waistband that sat exactly at the natural waist without a belt. The runway showed forty looks. Thirty-eight were in neutral tones. The two exceptions were a rust orange jacket and a deep green coat — both colours pulled from the Hermès archive of leather dyes.

This is not minimalism. It is reduction. Vanhée-Cybulski designs for women who do not want to be read before they are heard.

Pierre-Alexis Dumas, the current artistic director and sixth-generation family member, has said the house does not follow fashion cycles. Hermès produces two collections per year because the calendar requires it, but the company does not retire styles to make room for the new. The Constance bag, introduced in 1969, is still in production. So is the Evelyne, from 1978. A client can order a Kelly in the same dimensions her grandmother ordered in 1956.

This approach has commercial consequences. Hermès does not discount. It does not collaborate with streetwear brands or produce capsule collections for online drops. When the company does collaborate — as it did with Apple on a limited-edition watch band — the partnership is functional, not aspirational. The band was leather. It had hand-stitching. It cost more than the watch.

Revenue has grown regardless. In 2023, Hermès reported €13.4 billion in sales, an increase of 28% over the previous year. The waiting list for a Birkin is now estimated at two to five years, depending on the boutique and the client.

The workshop at Pantin

In 2011, Hermès opened a leather goods atelier in Pantin, a suburb northeast of Paris. The building is three stories, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a glass-walled staircase. It does not look like a factory. It looks like a place where you would want to spend eight hours cutting leather.

Each artisan has a dedicated workbench. The tools — skiving knives, edge bevelers, pricking irons — are stored in drawers built into the bench. The artisan selects a hide, cuts the pattern, skives the edges to reduce bulk, and stitches the bag by hand using a saddle stitch, the same stitch Thierry Hermès used in 1837. The thread is linen, coated in beeswax. Two needles pass through each hole from opposite directions, locking the thread. If one thread breaks, the other holds.

Training takes two years. The artisan begins with small goods — cardholders, coin purses — and progresses to larger bags only after demonstrating control at every step. Hermès does not hire experienced leather workers from other houses. The company prefers to train from the beginning, because the technique is specific and must be internalised.

There are now twenty-one Hermès leather ateliers in France. The Pantin workshop produces Birkins and Kellys. It also produces the Herbag, a canvas and leather tote that costs less than a tenth of a Birkin and requires no waitlist. Both bags are made in the same building, by artisans trained in the same method.

The house has never separated its accessible line from its exclusive one. A silk scarf costs €450. A Birkin starts at €10,000. Both are sold in the same boutique, on the same floor. Hermès assumes the client who buys the scarf may one day buy the bag, or may not, and either outcome is acceptable.

The atelier in Pantin does not have a visitor entrance. Hermès does not offer factory tours. The building is for work, and the work is not a spectacle. It is the reason a saddle stitched in 1837 is still intact.