Objects for a world on the move

More ways to travel

By the early twentieth century, the future of Hermès could no longer be described through a horse alone. The Haut à courroies bag, placed around 1900 in the company's older chronology, provides a useful starting point. The French intellectual-property institute, INPI, describes it as a bag for a rider's equipment. The change of emphasis is small but consequential: the maker is attending to what a person needs to carry as well as to the equipment of the horse.^[7][3]

This should not be imagined as a single, dramatic farewell to saddlery. The more interesting story is an expanding field of work. Existing knowledge of leather could be applied to other objects, while unfamiliar materials and mechanisms offered new possibilities. The interwar years made this widening unusually visible.

A fastener with a new future

Hermès places Émile Hermès, Charles-Émile's son, at the centre of its zipper story. In the company's account, a visit to Canada brought him into contact with an American fastening system used on a car's hood. In 1922, he secured exclusive rights for its development in France. The device subsequently appeared on the house's luggage and other designs.^[1]

This is an account of recognition and adoption, not a claim that Hermès invented the zipper. The distinction leaves the episode more convincing. An industrial mechanism could be noticed in one setting and made useful in another. Its appeal lay in the action it enabled: opening, closing and securing an object without the same arrangement of straps or buttons.

A specific entry in Hermès' 2018 historical chronology records zip-fastened gloves in 1924. That modest example is worth retaining beside the more familiar bag story. It shows the mechanism crossing product boundaries. The innovation was not confined to a single celebrated design; it could become part of the vocabulary with which different everyday problems were answered.^[7]

The body in movement

In 1925, Hermès created a golf jacket, identified in its corporate chronology as its first ready-to-wear garment. Jewelry followed in 1927, with the Filet de selle bracelet. These dates suggest a widening view of the customer: someone who dressed, played sport and chose accessories, rather than someone encountered only through a riding order.^[2]

A surviving object makes the transition tangible. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds Hermès beachwear dated 1929–1932, accession C.I.56.33.17a–c. Its listed materials are silk, rubber, steel and mother-of-pearl. Even without turning the catalogue entry into a story about an unnamed wearer, that combination is revealing. The object belongs to leisure clothing and its construction cannot be described by leather alone.^[4]

The museum dates a particular surviving ensemble. It does not, on that basis, establish the first year in which Hermès made beachwear. Such distinctions allow the object to do its own work as evidence. It shows that the house's interwar range reached beyond the equestrian wardrobe, without requiring a sweeping claim about everything it produced.

Smaller objects, wider lives

Two records at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs add different kinds of use. A sac-manchon, or muff bag, is dated to around 1930. The catalogue identifies sealskin fur, grained calf leather and a lambskin lining. A separate sac à dépêches, also dated around 1930, is catalogued as a men's accessory and carries the initials P.A.M. on its fastening flap.^[5][6]

These are not interchangeable examples of a generic luxury bag. One joins carrying with warmth; the other belongs to the world of documents. Their interest lies in that specificity. They suggest how far a leather-goods business could travel without making all its objects answer the same need. The initials also remind us that a museum object can preserve a trace of personal use without allowing us to identify its owner.

A square at the centenary

In 1937, the first Hermès silk scarf appeared: Jeu des omnibus et dames blanches. A century after the founding workshop, the business had gained a medium on which an image could take the leading role.^[2]

Seen together, the bag, zipper, golf jacket, beach ensemble and scarf do not form an inevitable march towards a modern brand. They reveal a series of choices about use, materials and the lives of customers. Hermès' early twentieth-century transformation becomes easier to understand when those choices remain separate enough to be seen.