ON THE EARTH

On a bright, breezy afternoon at La Pelota in the heart of Milan-where Hermès holds its annual presentation every springBenoit Pierre Emery, the creative director of tableware, laid out a tray with pieces from the dinner service Tressages Équestres.

- Komal Sharma

The hand instinctively wants to touch: the particular terracotta, zings of lemon and mint colours, the braiding and harness motifs that lie at the very origin of Hermès, so delicately and precisely emerging on the fine creamy white of the kaolin. Twenty-seven piecesthey are designed by Virginie Jamin, under the artistic direction of Emery. Below, on the ground floor, within a black box setting, the scenography (pictured on the next page) this year felt primordial, civilizational, an ode to the earth and its magnanimity captured in triangles and trapezoids. And behind this life-size layout that one could traverse and walk through was a discreet black lane that presented the old and the new, the archival and the current, the muse and the creation all in a singsong, portraying a material, visual, and philosophical continuity. Patterns from a 1950s jockey's shirt re-emerge in a different scale on a cashmere blanket, the braiding motif of a leather harness is given another life on a porcelain piece-and all the time, one is witness to the skill, mastery, and superlative craftsmanship of Hermès.

In a conversation with the creatives behind Hermès's presentation in Milan earlier this year, the enigmatic idea of craftsmanship was a recurring theme.

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