Waste Not, Want Not

One man’s trash is quite literally turned into another man’s treasure at Hermès’s petit h workshop.

- Kames Narayanan

The timeworn adage, “waste not, want not”, is always sound advice, but to make it worthwhile in business takes special dedication. This ethos resonates deeply with Pascale Mussard, the founder of Hermès’s petit h collections — a line-up of whimsical objects birthed from a plethora of materials rendered as waste at the French maison’s ateliers. Inaugurated in 2010, the workshop sees Hermès tapping on a diverse crop of artisans and artists from varying fields to breathe a renewed lease of life into discarded materials that run the gamut from scraps of leather to pieces that have failed the atelier’s stringent quality control checks.

Unbound by the conventional perimeters of design and subject only to the mentorship of creative director Godefroy de Virieu, the artisans and designers are granted creative carte blanche to bring the objects of their imagination to the touch of reality. The catch-22: a design process that is reverse engineered. Granted the nature of the petit h workshops, designers work within the boundary of a fixed line-up of materials rather than finding a fit for a preconceived idea.

While the eventual rundown of objects may seem random, a sense of alchemy and wonder is ever-present across the collections throughout the years. The most recent collection making its round around the globe shows off a wide-ranging array that counts pendants, skateboards and a fox mask as a part of its selection. Here, we delve deeper into the collaboration between artisans and designers at Hermès in an email correspondence with Virieu.

KAMES NARAYANAN: What do you think are the novelties of creating in reverse rather than the other way round?