For Milan Design Week 2025, Hermès is returning to La Pelota with its new scenography by Charlotte Macaux Perelman, architect and artistic director of Hermès collections for the home with Alexis Fabry. The new creations can be discovered in white – nearly colourless – suspended boxes, projecting halos of bright colours onto the floor. It is through the immateriality of their aura that the objects first appear, like emotions. This staging is a quest for the object, for the luminous vibration that makes it familiar.
What makes the object
To design an object, to make it, a box is needed. Like a sculptor’s marble block, it contains the object, the idea we have of it, and the dream it inspires. But to reach the object, the box does not need to be opened, at least not fully. The attentive eye will notice openings, holes or windows cut into it, the shell becoming lighter here and there until it is transparent, revealing the fluidity of glass, of a colour.
Inside the box is the latent object, the perfect object, the power of imagination, on the threshold of an intermediate world. It is not an illusion. The idea of it heralds its use, the latter suggesting the former. Nothing more is said when evoking a vase, a carafe, a plate, a table or a throw.
Out of its box, the object takes a part of this aura with it. The other part is the memory of its idealised perfection, inseparable from its presence. And the object is there, appearing gradually in glimpses and reflections. Space is concentrated or expanded by its light.
Certain objects, furniture and fabrics come alive with a reassuring vibration, shimmering with a familiar halo. An object can be an emotion.
SIDE TABLE – PIVOT D’HERMÈS
This small table is the manifesto of a tightrope walker. Designer Tomás Alonso seeks balance, plays with ideas and materials, and combines paradoxes. Lacquered glass paints a rectilinear base whose colours come together like on a colour wheel. On the tabletop, a round box in sugi (Japanese cedar), its band curved using an ancient Japanese technique, moves on an eccentric axis and gives the table its unexpected movement.
GLASSES – CASAQUE
The coloured, cased glass is cold cut by the glassmaker to create stripes or a chequerboard pattern. The subtly graduated colours become darker or lighter, depending on the angle at which they are viewed and the alternating geometries superimposed by the eye. The cutting work – carried out over large areas according to strict orthogonality – is infinitely precise.
JUGS – DOUBLÉ D’HERMÈS
A master glassmaker melts the material in order to blow it, turn it, cut it, pinch it and shape it in line with the drawing that serves as a model. To create this object, the glassmaker superimposed two different coloured molten pastes onto the glass. Filled with water, these jugs present an infinite range of shades.
THROW – POINTS ET PLANS
The large Points et Plans throw, designed by artist Amer Musa, recalls a child’s game, like draughts, on which multicoloured cashmere appliqué dots are stitched to a large, criss-crossed frame woven into cashmere fabric.
VASE – DOUBLÉ D’HERMÈS
To create these oversized glass vases with their deep colour gradations, the master glassmaker combined molten materials using the casing technique, superimposing up to 7 successive layers of glass. The opacity of the supple leather cuff contrasts with the transparency of the glass to form a three-colour geometric pattern.
THROW – H PARTITION
A precious composition. 24-carat gold powder has been delicately applied to a fine, hand-woven cashmere chevron design in a natural ivory colour. The design of this refined throw evokes musical staves.
BOX – DOUBLÉ D’HERMÈS
This variation of the iconic H in coloured glass is the lid of a sycamore box. Produced using the fusing technique, where different coloured layers of glass are fused together, the coloured plates obtained are superimposed to form a minimalist grid that outlines the house’s initial.
THROW – STRIPED DYE
The different colour baths superimposed on jacquard lines give character to this large cashmere throw. The fringes, knotted at both ends, reveal traces of the successive baths.
VASE – CASAQUE
The coloured, cased glass is cold cut by the glassmaker to create stripes or a chequerboard pattern. The subtly graduated colours become darker or lighter, depending on the angle at which they are viewed and the alternating geometries superimposed by the eye. The cutting work – carried out over large areas according to strict orthogonality – is infinitely precise.
BASKET – PADDOCK
These leather baskets recall the tartan pattern that traditionally adorns horse blankets. The different colours of leather are applied to a saddle-stitched form to create a perfectly proportioned cylinder.
THROW – SUMMER DYE
This vast summer throw in light, soft double cashmere holds its own in material and style. Successively dipped in different dye baths, it reveals a colourful H through the magic of superimposition. A resist-dyed H also appears.
DINNER SERVICE – HERMÈS EN CONTREPOINT
This thirty-three piece kaolin white porcelain table service is lined with friezes in soft or bright colours. The geometric motifs, hand-drawn and painted in watercolour by the artist Nigel Peake, bring us into the graphic universe of musical metre and its repeated fractions, inviting us to create a multitude of combinations.
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