With fashion houses where luxury and craftsmanship are threaded into the fibres of their DNA, it’s it feels like everything they touch turns to gold. For Hermès, this extends to its stores, including the design of its famous windows. Used as a vessel for platforming authentic artistic collaborations, the designs have been the stuff of high street legends. After Tunisian designer and decorator Leïla Menchari revolutionised the craft through her cinematic displays (she was responsible for Hermès’ window dressing at the Faubourg Saint-Honoré store from the ‘70s up until 2013), artists who have since been enlisted to collaborate with the house have included Jonathan Baldock and Anna Burns. Fast forward to today, and the baton has been passed onto Katie Scott, whose vibrant work, dubbed Drawn to Nature, is on display in the windows of Hermès’ Sloane Street store until August 27.
“It was brilliant,” Scott says of how she found the process of applying her craft to a Hermès window. “I’ve never worked on anything 3D before.” This is not Scott’s first collab with the luxury house, with her flora and fauna designs previously used on prints for silks and homewares. “When I’ve worked with Hermès [in the past], the illustrations are applied to a physical object, but it’s still always in a two-dimensional sense. So, it was a challenge for me just to think in three dimensions.”
Inspired by both real and fantastical flowers, Scott’s design also integrates animated creatures such as fuzzy bugs that flap across the scene with pastel-tinged wings and birds with fanning, cobalt feathers. Echoing a landscape that would feel right at home in Alice’s Wonderland, one window shows a sprawling flower emerging from the pages of an oversized botanical book. It’s childlike in the wonder it conjures and inspired in its creativity. “I have such a good archive of flower imagery, so once we knew the theme was flowers, I was very set up for that,” says Scott. “Flowers are the best source of inspiration as an artist because there are so many. You never exhaust the pool of flowers. Especially if you add a slight twist of the imaginary and fantasy onto that, you will start to hybridise them, and you can make even more because you’re not literal.”
The craftsmanship, as ever with Hermès is something to behold. Every petal, every feather and every leaf in the display is crafted solely from paper. For Scott, the various forms that her work can take is what’s so exciting about working with the house. “The fact that you can start working on silk and then, someone from the homework department sees your work on the silk and suddenly you’re like designing a cushion.” She continues, “You can move around [with Hermès], as opposed to just doing one thing all the time.” An exquisite example of when imagination meets craft, Drawn to Nature is available to see now at Hermès, 1 Cadogan Place from today.
Photography by Catherine Scrivener.
