I had the pleasure to attend a talk by Alice Shirley today on her designs for Hermes. Initially I was the only person there until the venue staff came to join in.(Eventually few others who were there to check out some art pieces came by to join the talk.) I had Jardin Anglais twilly on my bag for the event!
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Most of the talk was covered in this interview here.
She began working with Hermes in 2012 and she was invited to the factory in Lyon to see how the silks were printed. Each design is engraved by one person before it is then printed. She mentioned later on that there's now one person that engraves all her designs, someone whom she finally met recently for her latest design. She then talked a little bit about each design in chronological order. Zebra Pegasus is her very first design for Hermes and below is the original work that she submitted. (@cavalla you did good!)
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Dans un Jardin Anglais is the next and it was inspired by the Indian miniature painting technique of gouache. This design took 6 months as each time she went back to Hermes they wanted her to add more details to it!She didn't bring the original cw that she submitted though!
Next is Tyger Tyger and she did a lot of research to find out the plants and flowers of the natural habitat where tiger generally lives. She was going to submit the work to Hermes but was awake at 4am on the day of submission and decided to redraw the design for submission! Hermes took the second drawing and below is the original cw submitted. The initial design had the tiger laying horizontally instead with the jungle surrounding it. (@ksuromax
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With Under the Waves she had endangered species in mind since she's been working on that for a different organization. Since the brief from Hermes was underwater world, she decided that she wanted to highlight the endangered species of coral reefs with it.
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For Grr, her very first mens scarf the brief is a bear, but one that isn't too scary nor too cutesy. The bear has blue eyes as the head of menswear has beautiful blue eyes and had asked if she could have blue eyes for the bear.
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Appaloose des Steppes is her own creation as she wasn't given a titled brief for it. Most people think that Appaloosa is from Americas but a lady in New Zealand was convinced that it's from Central Asia. Read here. The background for the design is of traditional Kyrgyzstan rugs/textiles. Each one is a symbolic landscape. Some of the main traits of an Appaloosa horse are striped hooves and sparse manes. (Not all have black spots as some are black with white snowflakes she said.)
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And last but not least, Into the Canadian Wild was commissioned by Hermes of course and it was a really tight schedule as she had 6 weeks to complete it from conception to submission! In the brief she was told that they want no people in the design, all nature and no Winter scenes as people tend to think of Canada as a snowy wintery place. The original cw submitted is the exclusive one for Canada and it used 45 silk screens. (Lucky you if you own one of these!) Other cws used less silk screens. She was flown in for the launch of the silk and she said it felt really surreal that people were lining around the block to purchase the scarf and she sat for 5 hours at the store signing scarf boxes.
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I brought along a list of questions to ask as below:
How much input does Hermes have on what the designs?
It's rather broad. Sometimes she's given a brief but other times she isn't and is free to create whatever design she fancies.
Which is your favorite silk design thus far for Hermes?
Zebra Pegasus
Does she wear her Hermes scarves?
Yes, she tends to wear her cashmere silk scarves more than her 90 silks.
Which other Hermes artist's work does she like?
Nigel Peake and another new artist whose work will be coming soon.
How much input did she have regarding color schemes for the final silk?
She doesn't have any control over the various cws that are being produced. (Which makes sense as this is done by Bali Barret and each season has a different color palette.) They do however always include her original cw as one of the cws for the season.
How long does the design take from initial concept to production, and final issue?
On average 3 months (exceptions mentioned above).
Last but not least she shared there there will be a mens scarf from her for FW18, a wolf. That's all I'm allowed to share.
weN, many thanks for being our eyes and ears for this event, so nice of you to share!
I love hearing all these tidbits of the design process, very fun!
