Integrity, as they say, is who you are when nobody’s watching. As someone who spent many years on the inside at Hermès, I’ve become somewhat of an intimate accomplice. Much like those ‘come as you are’ family dinners where you’ve nothing to prove to anyone, it is fair to say that Hermès—the house and its people—are exactly who they are on the inside as they project to the world: a collective of dreamers, poets and at the very core, craftsmen. Few embody this spirit more than celebrated Hermès perfumer, Christine Nagel.
Years ago, as we sat in a conference room of the Hermès in Ginza, Tokyo, Nagel uttered a that still liberates me today. “You have the right to make mistakes.” It was a decree that Hermès’s sixth-generation artistic director, PierreAlexis Dumas, made to her when she joined the house.
