For
Milan Design Week 2024 , French fashion house
Hermès has designed an installation that uses
reclaimed brick ,
slate ,
marble and
terracotta to draw attention to the brand's artisanal roots. Spread across the floor of Milan’s
La Pelota venue, Hermès artistic directors
Charlotte Macaux Perelman and
Alexis Fabry have created a
patterned surface composed of more than
twenty different organic materials. The materials, which include
stone, clay, earth, soil and
volcanic rocks , were divided by a trail and assembled into patterns inspired by a
silk jockey blouse from the house's archive. After the Milan design week, the installation will be dismantled with the materials
sent back to local suppliers to be
reused and
recycled. A path laid out across the surface allows visitors to see the
different materials up close , before heading behind a screen to see a collection of Hermès home products.
Here, newly launched pieces are juxtaposed with existing products from the house’s archive. The older pieces were chosen because of their
connection to the new designs , and were hidden away to allow visitors to experience
“the idea of slowness.” "The intention was to show the connection to the
earth , to the
soil and the
connection to the Hermès legacy," explained
Charlotte Macaux Perelman. "In the project, we also tried to convey the idea of
slowness, of the path to get there, like a journey – not to show the objects, therefore, in the first part of the cinematography, but to allow the passage of the path to get there to give people time to discover these objects", he adds.
