IF THERE IS a signifying gesture that contains nearly 200 years of obsession, it is the ballet of the point sellier. This is how it begins: The artisan is young, maybe 35, with a confidence that comes from years on the bench, eyes focused on two small back-to-back precut pieces of leather. She holds in each hand a two-inch needle, threaded with linen fiber that she has dragged through beeswax to render waterproof. Then, wielding the needles like surgical instruments, she pierces the leather, pulling taut the threads to draw the halves together in an unbreakable bond. Whether it’s bleu saphir for the panel of a Birkin or tawny caramel for a harness or juniper suede for the shoulder of a blazer — it would depend on which of the 16 ateliers she works in — the motion, as percussive as the clash of cymbals at the climax of a symphony, has been the same since the leather craftsman Thierry Hermès left Germany for Paris, using just such a stitch to craft harnesses for the gentry at the company he founded in 1837.

The handbag — or the jacket, the briefcase, the chair — will possess no overt logo (a few accessories sport an “H,” but privately most people inside the company regard branding with a slight wince). It will be the artisan’s from start to finish, through the gluing and the feather-light sanding and the infinitesimal strokes of dye applied at the edges by an ultrafine brush and the tap-tap of a tiny hammer that ensures the hardware is perfectly aligned and anchored for posterity to the skins. It will take days, or in the case of a larger item — like a saddle, still made in the workshop where Hermès’s only son, Charles-Émile, moved the company after taking over in 1880, on the top floor of a building on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, above what is now the flagship store — maybe weeks. It will be perfect and will cost more than virtually any other such item you can buy off a shelf (the company also keeps several ateliers just for custom orders, another magnitude of extravagance), though ever so slightly different from all the others because of the particular hand used to create it. “We would never think of having someone just do all the sewing and then another person do the hardware,” says Céline Rochereau, who after 30 years in the handbag ateliers in France and workshops worldwide now keeps track of the dozens of artisans Hermès posts, like foreign attachés, in cities around the world, in case a customer in Shanghai or Seoul or San Francisco needs a closure tweaked or a stain removed. “You put your mark on it from start to finish; it is yours.”

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