By Giulia Piceni. Cover images Hermès.
What is Hermès Stories? A Theatrical Performance of Luxury Heritage
To imagine what is going to happen at the Franco Parenti Theatre in Milan this September, one must first set aside all the conventional associations linked to a luxury brand luxury brand recounting its past. The experience of Hermès Stories is not a runway presentation designed to impress with seasonal gestures, nor a glossy book of archival photography leafed through distractedly, nor an exhibition where objects are admired behind glass and separated from their context. Instead, it’s something altogether more unexpected and ambitious: the transformation of Hermès memory into a theatrical performance where sound, movement and narrative intertwine. The audience, equipped with headphones that magnify the tiniest of sounds, is transported into a realm where even the cut of scissors or the creak of leather carries the weight of a story.
The Creative Minds Behind Hermès Stories
The production, conceived by Pierre-Alexis Dumas, artistic director of Hermès and heir to the family tradition, and entrusted to the direction of Pauline Bayle, a playwright, actress, and since 2022 director of the Théâtre Public de Montreuil, stands as a meditation on how heritage can be reimagined not as a static treasure to be preserved but as a living force to be staged. To grasp the originality of this choice, one can follow five steps, each of which reveals a different dimension of how Hermès Stories reinvents the art of cultural storytelling.
Saddlery and Silk: Living Myths on Stage
It has often claimed that fashion is condemned to live only in the present, chasing novelty with such urgency that it forgets what came before. Yet Hermès has long insisted on the contrary, affirming that no creation can truly exist without memory. Hermès Stories embodies this conviction by refusing to treat history as something to be recited or catalogued. Instead, the past is given theatrical form, as if the long lineage of gestures, tools, materials and encounters were waiting to be spoken aloud. Jean-Louis Dumas, who shaped the maison during the late twentieth century, once observed that memory is indispensable to creation. Here, that aphorism is not merely quoted but enacted: history is turned into a dramaturgical device, where the founding myths of saddlery and silk are not displayed as relics but staged as living presences, enabling the audience to feel that the continuity of time is not linear but circular, a cycle of reinvention that echoes through each scene.
Hermès Sounds: Tools, Silk, and Sonic Craftmanship
In most encounters with fashion, the eye reigns supreme, whether in the dazzle of a catwalk or the stillness of a photograph. However, Hermès Stories deliberately inverts that hierarchy by asking the audience to listen before they look, to allow sound to guide their imagination more powerfully than costume or décor. This choice is not entirely unprecedented: in 2019, Hermès launched The Faubourg of Dreams, a podcast that opened an aural path through its Parisian headquarters, and which was later praised by Avery Trufelman for the refinement of its sound design.
The Milan production continues this experiment by installing on stage a peculiar figure, Monsieur Bruit, whose role is to generate in real time an entire landscape of sound effects from the very instruments of the workshops and from Hermès objects themselves. Through headphones, the audience perceives the full resonance of craftsmanship: the rhythm of hammers on leather, the metallic scrape of tools, and the faint yet unmistakable whisper of silk sliding against itself. These sounds, which might pass unnoticed in daily life, here acquire the density of music, reminding us that luxury is not only a matter of what is seen but also of what is heard and felt.
Hermès Logo Reimagined as a Main Character
If one usually encounters a brand logo as a graphic emblem endlessly repeated across packaging and accessories, here the iconic groom of Hermès, painted in the nineteenth century by Alfred de Dreux, has been reimagined as Lad, a fully embodied character who serves as the audience’s guide through a world suspended between memory and fantasy. Entrusted to a young actress, Lad is no longer the decorative outline of a carriage scene but a figure who walks, speaks and imagines, transforming the ordinary into the marvellous. Through Lad’s eyes, the streets of Paris metamorphose into thresholds across time, an umbrella becomes a protective shield in the snow, a giant carré stretches into a vessel capable of traversing space, and the backrooms of workshops expand into landscapes of myth.
This is how the performance introduces the sixteen métiers of the maison, from saddlery and leatherwork to prêt-à-porter and the art of living, not as categories on a list but as episodes in a fantastic journey that ties the labour of artisans to the myths of explorers.
Accessories Become Protagonists at Hermès Stories
Pierre-Alexis Dumas has often argued that every Hermès object is more than a commodity; it contains a voice, a memory, a fragment of lived time, and the production gives this belief theatrical reality by placing objects at the centre of the stage not as passive props but as protagonists in their own right. In Hermès Stories, the objects cease to be mere accessories or furnishings and become witnesses, narrators and companions, speaking of the patience of gestures repeated across generations, the coincidences that arise in the encounter between client and artisan, and the curiosities that mark a family enterprise that has survived for nearly two centuries.
Thus the performance resists the temptation of corporate celebration and instead constructs a theatre of things, a drama in which umbrellas, silks, bracelets and even boxes take on a life of their own, reminding the audience that in the world of Hermès luxury is never a sterile abstraction but always a living dialogue between matter and memory.
From Orange Boxes to Roller Skates: Hermès’ Archive Comes Alive
The evening does not end with the curtain call but continues in the theatre foyer, where the spectators are invited to wander through a series of objects carefully chosen from the Conservatoire des créations and the Collection Émile Hermès. Unlike a museum display, which might have placed them at a respectful distance, the installation allows for proximity and story-telling. Here one encounters the Rocabar motif, once woven for the blankets of racehorses in the nineteenth century, alongside the first silk carré designed by Robert Dumas, produced in the centenary year of the maison.
Nearby rests the Collier de chien bracelet, created in 1927 at the unusual request of a client and adorned with the now-famous Médor studs, while a simple orange box recalls the constraints of the Second World War that inadvertently produced an enduring symbol. Even more unexpected are the roller skates of the Ateliers Horizons, proof that play, experiment and a sense of humor coexist within a tradition often associated only with rigor. In this way the archive is not reduced to a catalogue of relics but transformed into a living encounter with stories that reveal the maison’s constant reinvention.
