News

Nov 07, 2023

Wild Horses: Hermès Stages an Astonishing Ride Into the Sunset

By Luke Leitch “Astonishment is a human quality: it’s the ability to wonder, to

By Luke Leitch

"Astonishment is a human quality: it's the ability to wonder, to surprise ourselves, and to reinvent ourselves." So said Pierre-Alexis Dumas, artistic director and family scion of Hermès, as he stood by an open fire late Tuesday night and addressed the crowd of 150 people, all shod (like Dumas) in black mid-calf rain boots. We were in the Rhone delta, deep within the Camargue Regional Nature Park, in the South of France. Lightning occasionally illuminated the otherwise star-speckled sky.

Dumas was addressing an audience composed mostly of Hermès staff members drawn from across the globe. Along for the TGV ride down from Paris was a cluster of journalists and friends of the house. We were here to observe a ritual which in its unorthodox eccentricity and undoubted romance is distinctly Hermès: the unveiling of its annual "theme." This is a word-encapsulated concept through which the 186-ish year old company every year seeks to creatively redefine itself. In 2022 it was "lightness"—a sort of late-stage Covid gentleness—but for 2023, intoned Dumas by that flickering fire, Hermès will return with full intention to its raison d’etre in order to become: "astonishing."

To transmit the essence of its themes into its global corporate diaspora, Hermès seeks every year to embody them, which is where the really fun part comes in. Before leaving Paris, we had been given no clue as to where we were going. Upon alighting at Avignon, then transferring south towards the Camargue, the location became apparent, but not the purpose. What would we be doing in our rain boots? Some speculated we might harvest rice from the paddies that lined the road we trundled down.

Suddenly, the first bus in line wheezed to a halt: a tree had apparently fallen to block the road. As we scrambled out onto the mosquito-thronged verge—with key Hermès Paris personnel remaining determinedly straight-faced—a few of us offered to haul it out of the way. Then two Manadiers— Camargue cowboys—clopped into view. We jumped into four tractor-pulled trailers and headed off-road, through a paddock of local bulls—Raço di Biòu‚and next a beautiful group of local Camargue horses, which the Manadiers rear to herd their bulls. Along the way we were offered bottles of "infusion" by a traditionally-dressed couple in a cart. We were not in Paris anymore.

The poetic weirdness began when the tractors pulled up alongside singer Lyra Pramuk and a group of male performers standing alongside a large white glider. Pramuk was wearing a harnessed orange parachute, as if she’d just fallen to earth. After some abstract performance, a pipe-blowing gentleman led us like mice across the darkening plain to where bleachers had been set up behind a swampy pool. We waded through it to take our seats.

The sun was dipping as that horde of horses—around 40 of them, from fragile foals to doughty mares and hardy stallions—raced across the marsh from the horizon towards us. Was there something in that infusion we should have known about? Ethereal choral music, led by Pramuk ululation, backdropped the thud of hoof and whoop of Manadier as they thundered through that pool. Over the next half hour or so they returned again and again, mesmerizingly, in between incredible acrobatic collaborations between the riders and horses of a troupe named Hasta Luego. There was also a lot of abstract choreography conducted by the Marseilles-based movement collective (La)Horde, which was responsible for the artistic direction of this Theme event. Behind them the sunset grew ever more climatically outrageous—a symphony of hyper-real color akin to that described by Rickie Lee Jones on Orb's "Little Fluffy Clouds." At the end, of course, the horses rode off into that sunset. It was perfectly Astonishing.

Later at that fire in the arena of the Manadier family, the Laurents, who hosted us, it all came together. Dumas said that under a new Hermès leather goods facility being developed in Normandy archaeologists had discovered evidence of Paleolithic-era inhabitants who also worked leather. He added: "As my cousin Axel, who is our chairman, said at the opening of the factory: ‘We belong to a tribe that existed 15, 000 years ago.’"

By connecting the enchanting traditional practice of the Laurents via a spellbinding miasma of poetic performance Dumas was working to use that campfire to retell the Hermès story in context of timelessness long preceding the founding of his family's pretty long-established company. He closed the book—for now—on that story by saying: "This year we’re celebrating astonishment as an essential value in the magic recipe of what Hermès is all about. Hermès is a culture, a 180-something year old culture. And every year we just try to look again at this culture and bring good light on what is an essential value." As the rain started to fall into the flames, Hermès's mystical rodeo drew to a close.