EVENT: FESTIVAL DES METIERS - A RENDEZ VOUS WITH HERMES CRAFTSMEN

Festival Des Metiers is an exhibition of craftsmenship that was held by Hermes at Dubai Mall last week.. I went to check it out and see if I could learn something new and after spending over an hour talking to the team I walked away with so much new knowledge it blew me away.

All the craftsmen were flown in from the Hermes workshop in Lyon, France to display their work. They included a saddler, a tie maker, a leather artisan, a shirt maker, a watch maker, a gem setter and of course the silk scarf printers and silk engraver, the latter being my main focus of the day.

Kamel Hamadou - Silk Printer 

After spotting my camera and finding out I was a blogger, Kamel gave me a quick walk through of the process before the crowds gathered. First he explained that a Hermes silk scarf takes 2 years to make from start to finish. It all starts with the silk of these cocoons, which is used to make the 90cmx90cm silk squares. 

After acquiring a drawing from an artist, a silk engraver studies the drawing to determine the number of colours, each scarf can be made of a maximum of 45 colours, each one is drawn on a different clear sheet. This process can take anything from 450 hours to 2000+ hours depending on how intricate the design is.

Nadine Rabilloud, Silk Engraver

Each colour gets one sheet and they are drawn from darkest to lightest, after completing all the sheets using different tools and Chinese ink, they are printed on photo sensitive mesh that is used on the printing machine. Each colour is printed and left to dry before applying the next colour. The final step is the hand-sewn French hemming which takes 45 minutes.

Henri Lely, Silk Printer

It was amazing talking to all these craftsmen and understanding just what kind of work goes on behind the scenes of these coveted scarves. In a world of high tech machinery it's refreshing to see some good old fashioned skills being used. 

Here are some more shots I got of the exhibition.

 

Note worth mentioning: The Apache scarf being held above by Kamel is one of the hardest designs to date to complete. Nadine (who's been working with Hermes for 33 years) studied the drawing for over 2 years to identify the colours, she originally found 100 colours and had to bring it down to 35 to be able to produce. She spent almost 3000 hours engraving the drawing. The face of the man alone had 15 colours. Now tell me that's not worth spending on.