SQUARE FEAT

Over the last two decades, French designer Benoît-Pierre Emery, the creative director of Hermès' Table et Objets collections, has amassed a treasure trove of over 10,000 silk scarves. In celebration of the publication of a book featuring 6,500 of these graphic carrés, we take an exclusive look at his unusual collection, beautifully stored in his Parisian studio

- NICK VINSON

In 2000, Benoît-Pierre Emery bought a graphic silk scarf by Emanuel Ungaro; shortly afterward, another, by Dior. Fast-forward two decades and the Paris-based designer has amassed a collection of 10,000 pieces, 6,500 of them featured in Carré: A Vintage Scarf Collection, a new two-volume book published by Steidl.

Emery never had a master plan to build such a collection. ‘I didn’t expect to find so many interesting and amazing pieces,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t really a quest at first, it was just out of curiosity. I had this vision of a scarf that was quite classical because I knew the Hermès scarf, but I didn’t know that there were so many abstract graphic, strong and powerful scarves in terms of design. And at one point, it became quite addictive, like finding treasure. You cannot stop.’ It was at around the 200-piece mark that the designer realised such a collection could be part of an exhibition or a book.