A tale of two moths

You won't see the Brazilian silk babes, but their life story is illuminating. So let's go back to the love match between two Brazilian moths.

If you're a mathematician, you're going to enjoy this: the female produces 300 eggs, which hatch as many silkworms. Each silkworm then devours 15 kilograms of mulberry leaves at rapid-fire speed (three weeks) and, when satiated, begins to spin its cocoon. When unwound, 300 tiny, white pods yield 450,000 metres of silk thread – precisely the amount needed for a 90-square-centimetre Hermès scarf.

Fast-forward to the outskirts of Lyon, the ancestral silk capital of France, where 4300 people are engaged by Hermès to make silk scarves. Only the vast car park at the production centre hints at what might be behind the factory wall – it is planted with token mulberry trees.

The artisans include those who engrave, colour, print and finally hand-roll the edges of the scarves. And here's a little cultural note: French scarves are rolled and stitched to the front (roulotte à la française). The Italians, choosing to be different, do the reverse and roll the edges to the back.

It takes 300 cocoons to make a Hermès scarf. Vincent Leroux

Behind the scenes

It is the engraver's job to interpret the colours from original artworks commissioned from artists around the world, with 2000 designs having been commissioned to date. German-born Hugo Grygkar designed the famed Brides de Gala in 1957 and went on to become one of the brand's most prolific creators; most recently, artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas engaged Chinese artist Ding Yi.


Since 1987, when Hermès produced L'Année du Feu D'Artifice​ (The Year of the Fireworks), it has chosen an annual theme to dictate the mood. Any new design is always produced as the artist's original and in several other colour ways, while vintage prints are often re-released in new colour palettes.

Engraver Manon Fantauzzi, a young graduate of Lyon's fashion school, uses her quill, dipped in Indian ink, to give depth, relief, gradient, shadows and light to a design. "It can take between 400 and 500 hours to engrave a scarf of 30 colours," says Fantauzzi, who's wearing a re-edition of Lombarde de Boulevarde, softly looped around her neck. In a perfect marriage of computerised technology and human mastery, unique silk screens are then made for each colour in the engraving.

In the next step, 150-metre- long stretches of silk are set down for printing and the screens laid one by one, impressing colour from least to most and lightest to darkest with a level of precision of less than a tenth of a millimetre. There are 40 base colours in the Hermès printers' library, further enriched with pigments to create a total of 75,000 shades.

Making a screen for printing a Hermès scarf. Vincent Leroux

When the last screen is lifted, the printed silk is washed in Marseille soap, dried, pressed and cut into individual scarves before being sent for hand-rolling.

Exacting process

There's no compromise in this process. Unlike other companies that outsource production, Hermès holds its secrets close and over the years has integrated those companies it deems key. Ateliers AS, founded in Lyon in 1937 by a chemist and a colourist, began producing scarves for the brand 10 years later but today is a subsidiary of Hermès. Gandit, a Lyon company specialising in the frames for silk screen-printing, is also a subsidiary.

More than a million scarves will leave the Lyon workshops this year, yet Hermès came late to scarves. The company made harnesses and bridles for 100 years before introducing its first scarf in 1937. "Our first customer was a horse," Xavier Guerrand-Hermès, great-great-grandson of founder Thierry Hermès, quipped in an interview in 1980.


The debut print, Jeu des Omnibus et Dames Blanches, was created by Robert Dumas, the grandfather of today's artistic director. Best-selling designs since include Brides de Gala (selling about 30,000 copies a year since the 1960s), Astrologie (favourite of the fashion pack), Ex-Libris, Les Cles, Eperon d'Or, Springs and Feux d'Artifice.

The first colour layer is printed. Hermès printers have an arsenal of 40 base colours that can produce 75,000 shades. Vincent Leroux

Hermès and a silk scarf – they go together like a horse and carriage. See them in the making at Hermès at Work.

NEED TO KNOW

Lengths of printed fabric at the Hermès factory. Vincent Leroux

Hermès scarves are all hand-rolled and edged by hand. Vincent Leroux