The exhibit hosted a Hermès shirt maker, a pattern maker for the scarves, neck tie maker, diamond setter, watcher maker, and saddle maker. Each of these craftsmen spend many hours at a table stitching, outlining, sewing, and hammering small and dunique details in to the gorgeous Hermès items. One of my favorite stations was the designing of on the scarves onto sheets of plastic that will be used to make the screen for the screen-printing of each scarf, all done by a petite French woman named Nadine. She makes a sheet for every color that is in the scarf, and adds any detail such as shading all by hand (basically, if the motif has 30 colors, she makes 30 sheets). The scarf she displayed at the exhibit had over 30 colors, and will take approximately 420 hours. The quality of work that is used throughout the scarf making process is absolutely astounding.
Nadine adds shading to the plastic with an electric pen. An alternative to the electric pen is a sheet of textured paper, with a regular pencil with Chinese ink.
The exhibit also hosted a watch maker, who displayed the craftsmanship and quality of the classic timepieces. The watch maker, Mahander was from New York, and does repairs on watches sent in by customers. He displayed all of the tiny pieces that went into a traditional Hermès watch and even let me try one on with the classic Hermès Orange rubber band.
Every Hermès shirt takes around 8 hours, making each shirt maker craft one shirt a day. A custom shirt order can take around 6 weeks to arrive because the shirt is actually made in France and goes through a thorough inspection before it is sent to the customer.
The shirt maker's accessories displayed in the chic Hermès orange boxes.
The saddle maker uses a high-grade string that is thicker than fishing line and outlines the entire saddle. The saddler is cautious about stringing the thread through because it is large enough to cut and can be very dangerous.
The saddle maker seems to have the most physically straining job, many times using his own bodyweight to manipulate the saddle in different positions so to stitch everywhere needed.
Like all Hermès pieces, the saddle is branded and given a number of the saddler, which also tells the date the saddle was made.
With all the nooks on the saddle, the saddler uses a pick to stretch certain parts of the saddle so he can stitch through.
Pictures taken by Tim Schroeder for Standard Luxe
