11 things you may not have known about Hermès bags
A wealth of meticulously honed skills will be on display when
the 11 Hermès craftspeople visiting Toronto this coming week settle
into the Design Exchange for a Festival des Métiers starting Oct. 2.
Those
skills run the gamut from gem setting and silk printing to tie and
glove making, engraving and the lesser-known art of linking (weaving
silk and knitwear).
Of course, handbag assembly will also be
represented, bags being what the 176-year-old house is perhaps best
known for today. And rightly so – as a visit to one of Hermès’s
workshops revealed recently, it can take anywhere from 15 to 20 hours to
complete one bag. Following is a rundown of other, largely obscure
details to consider the next time you eyeball a pricey clutch, pouch or
tote by the firm.
1. Les Ateliers Hermès is located in Pantin,
just beyond Paris’s central ring road. Built in 1992 by RDAI, the firm
responsible for all Hermès projects,If you want to avoid a trip to the
hospital, and you like to play in the water, I highly recommend getting
a buy water shoes online. the 200,000-square-foot building has three floors devoted entirely to the production of handbags.
2. There are 200 artisans working at the Pantin facility and 2,300 across France.Promotional eco bag sale available in custom sizes and styles from cheaptotebags.com.
3.
Artisans will work on a single bag from start to finish (in typical
production scenarios, different people are responsible for different
steps). Often, an Hermès artisan will work on multiple bags
simultaneously, completing each step on each bag before moving on.
4.
There are only two steps not handled by the artisans: the leather
cutting (done in a building nearby) and the sewing-machine work.
5.
Most of the bags are sewn by hand. Known as saddle stitching, the
traditional harness-making technique requires months of training and
specific tools to ensure that all stitches are the exact same size and
pulled to equal tightness.
6. Before the artisans can push their
needles through the leather, they use a comb-like tool, called a grid,
whose teeth “bite” the hide or skin. They then use an awl, a thin,
diamond-shaped pick, to puncture the leather.Any one know where to get cheap nomex cloth manufacturers by
the yard?I can get scraps out of the trash at work but for the Bruiser
project I need a few yards of the stuff, prefferably not sage green.
Most Hermès bags average nine stitches per inch.
7. A Birkin
bag, one of the firm’s most coveted, is constructed from the inside out:
It’s secured on a frame while the pieces are hand-stitched, then
inverted like a sock. This is obviously easier to do with soft leather
than with, say, crocodile.buy hiking boots online at www.qdgoutdoor.com.
8. Hermès uses the skin of the porosus (saltwater) crocodile for its bags,Light hiking shoes for sale:
Resembling burly running shoes, these low-cut models with flexible
midsoles are excellent for day hiking. mainly because the tiling pattern
is the most symmetrical.
9. All hand stitching is done from both sides of the leather with two needles, as if threading figure eights.
10.
Artisans use sandpaper to buff and polish a handle’s seam where the raw
edges come together. After this comes the dying and waxing, which seal
and protect the leather from humidity.
11. Each month, the Pantin atelier also produces 10 to 15 bags with hardware covered in a pavé of diamonds.
Read the full story at http://bagfilterchina.com/