Harnais de Cœur

In Harnais de Cœur, the harness becomes an instrument of courtship. Hermès credits Daiske Nomura with the design and identifies its starting point as an 1804 plate by the architects and decorators Fontaine and Percier, preserved in the Émile Hermès collection. The date belongs to that earlier image. It places an old object behind the scarf without turning the scarf itself into an object from 1804.^[1]

The house’s account gives the equestrian couple a playful romantic role, with hearts in their harnesses and decoration extending as far as their hooves. Equipment that might ordinarily suggest discipline becomes a language of affection. The charm is in this gentle change of emphasis: the horse is not abandoned as a subject and neither is the harness. Instead, familiar equestrian forms are invited to tell a less formal story.^[2]

The documented colorways offer two ways into that story. One scarf pairs Marine Foncé with Mordoré and Blanc; another combines Gris Perle, Rose Bonbon and Bleu. Both are described as silk twill with hand-rolled edges, made in France. Their product pages give dimensions of 88.5 by 88.5 centimeters while naming the format scarf 90. The distinction is small but useful: a format name tells us the family of object, while the published measurement describes the particular realization.^[1][2]

The Twilly changes the proportions more dramatically. At five by eighty-six centimeters, this silk ribbon carries the design into a narrow strip rather than a square. Its listed colors are Grenadine, Gris and Jaune. The same title therefore opens onto different objects, each with its own scale and color. Looking across them is a way to notice how much a design’s character depends on the space it is given, not merely on the name it carries.^[3]

What remains undated is the first edition of Harnais de Cœur itself. That gap need not interrupt the encounter with the work. The secure thread runs from an early nineteenth-century plate to Nomura’s romantic reinterpretation, then to the particular silk objects documented here. Keeping those moments distinct leaves room for both history and delight, without asking one date to do the work of three.^[1]