Because Émile Maurice’s daughters and their husbands will take the brand to a whole new level during the first half of the 20th century. In the 1920s, Hermès moves into clothing, then watchmaking and jewellery, before also trying its hand at accessories and home decor.
It is at this time that the designer Lola Prusac, daughter of a big family of Polish weavers, joins the company. Put in charge of the first womenswear collection in 1926, she is the one who creates the brand’s famous silk squares. Designer of the first patterned swimsuits, she brings out collections that get noticed, drawing as much on everyday life as on artists like Mondrian, or others she rubs shoulders with, like Modigliani.
Ten years later, she leaves to launch her own label a little further down the street, at number 93. That famous number 93, home of TV host Thierry Ardisson, where he would film his dinner-party show for the French cable channel Paris Première.
Her clothes will be worn by the biggest post-war stars: Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall, Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve. The house closes amid relative indifference in 1980, a few years before her death.
The exact opposite of Hermès, which grabs the great changes of the century with both hands, becoming in particular a benchmark for bags and luggage, riding the boom in railways and motor cars.
In 1930, Robert Dumas comes up with the famous Kelly bag, still one of the brand’s best sellers alongside the Birkin bag, dreamt up in 1984 by… Jean-Louis Dumas, his son.
Because while it was the women who inherited the Hermès empire, it was the men who would run it and take the big decisions.
Thirty years before dreaming up the Birkin, Jean-Louis Dumas had joined the company run by his father. Appointed to the board in 1971, he becomes chairman in 1978. His ambition: keep expanding the group while cultivating discretion. A legacy, perhaps, of the family’s Protestantism.
Be that as it may, he relaunches watches and jewellery (without much success) and piles up acquisitions to grow the group.
In 1989, Dumas restructures the group with one idea in mind: taking Hermès public. Hermès becomes a société en commandite par actions, a partnership limited by shares, in which a general partner keeps control whatever the other shareholders own, and creates Emile Hermès SARL as its first general partner. A way of keeping control within the family for good.
At the IPO, 26% of the capital is offered to the public.
In 1998, Dumas brings in Martin Margiela, who had owned his own label for 10 years, before buying a stake in Jean Paul Gaultier, whose assistant Margiela had been. Gaultier ends up replacing Margiela.
At the same time, Dumas steps up the group’s international expansion, which had begun in China as early as 1961. He opens more than 50 of its own stores and no fewer than 200 points of sale, most of them designed by Rena… Dumas. His wife.
Under his leadership, revenue goes from €42M to €1.9bn.
Some time before his death, and for health reasons, Jean-Louis Dumas steps down in 2006 and hands over to Patrick Thomas, who had joined as managing director in 2003. He is the first boss who isn’t a member of the family. He stays until 2013, when he is replaced by Axel Dumas, Jean-Louis’s nephew. Axel’s mother, Michèle Dumas, had been deputy managing director of the group.