The Saddle Stitch: Six Generations of Hermès and the War for Its Soul

The call came on a Saturday morning — October 23, 2010 — and the voice on the line was almost excessively polite. Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH and the man the luxury trade called the wolf in cashmere, was telephoning Bertrand Puech, the elder who chaired the Hermès family holding, to share some news: LVMH had quietly come to own 17.1 percent of Hermès. Perhaps, he suggested, they could now be partners. Puech went pale; he could barely answer. On one side of that line stood a house then 173 years old, in its sixth generation of family hands, which believed in patience, in inheritance, in making things slowly — a tribe of self-described craftsmen oddly marooned in the modern economy. On the other stood the largest luxury group on earth, assembled by swallowing houses exactly like this one. The French press would call what followed the handbag war. Inside the family it felt like something else: a siege of the soul.

A Saddler’s Paris

Thierry Hermès was born in 1801 in Krefeld, a Rhineland town then under the French Republic, to a French father and a German mother — a Protestant innkeeper’s sixth child bound for a Catholic country. Orphaned at twenty, he apprenticed in the Normandy leather town of Pont-Audemer, and in 1837 opened a harness workshop in the ninth arrondissement of Paris, where the carriage was still king. His edge was not invention but obsession. He worked the saddle stitch — two needles crossing the same seam from opposite directions, every thread drawn through beeswax — and would spend months on a single harness so that horse and rider sat exactly right. Napoleon III became a client; so, it was said, did the tsar of Russia. At the 1867 World’s Fair his harnesses took a grand prize. When he died in the winter of 1878, at seventy-seven, he left one son, Charles-Émile, one modestly famous shop, and one conviction that would outlast every product: quality at the pace of the hand.

The House at 24 Faubourg

In 1880 Charles-Émile moved the business to 24 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré — the address that remains the family’s citadel — and widened its world. Orders came from across Europe; newspapers reported Hermès harness on the tsar’s carriages; agents went out with catalogs to the Americas and Asia. Every piece left the shop with a promise of lifetime repair, an extravagance in that era. In 1900, with his sons, he designed the Haut à Courroies, a tall leather bag made to carry a saddle and riding boots: the ancestor of everything.

The sons, Adolphe and Émile-Maurice, took over in 1902 as Hermès Frères — just in time for the horse to begin dying. The Great War gutted the carriage trade even as the workshop’s eighty saddlers stitched for Tsar Nicholas II, and mid-war Émile-Maurice sailed to America to look at the future. He saw Fords in the streets, and on the canvas tops of military vehicles he saw an ingenious fastener that closed like a metal track. He came home converted; his older brother was not. Adolphe, the conservative, sold his stake to Émile-Maurice in 1919 and walked away from the firm his grandfather had founded. The younger brother then executed one of the great pivots in commercial history. In 1922 he secured exclusive French rights to the zipper — Parisians called it the fermeture Hermès — and put it on Europe’s first zippered leather jacket and on travel bags. The same year, prodded by a wife who could not find a handbag she liked, he shrank the Haut à Courroies into a woman’s bag. Then the cascade: a zippered golf jacket in 1925, jewelry in 1927, watches and shoes in 1928, a first couture collection in 1929. The saddlery had become a house.

Émile-Maurice also gave it a liturgy. From his private collection he chose a painting by Alfred de Dreux — a carriage, a waiting groom, and no master — and made it the emblem, formally adopted in the 1940s: the missing master is the customer. When wartime shortages left only orange card stock for boxes, the makeshift became the trademark. And in 1937, the firm’s centenary, his son-in-law Robert Dumas designed the first silk scarf; Paris tied it on and never took it off.

The Princess Effect

Émile-Maurice had four daughters, and his three sons-in-law — Robert Dumas, Jean-René Guerrand, Francis Puech — came into the business; those three in-law clans have steered it ever since. When the patriarch died in 1951, Dumas took command. His era opened with the first perfume, Eau d’Hermès — saddle leather in a bottle, by the perfumer’s own account — and the necktie line, born when a Riviera casino turned away tieless gentlemen who marched next door to Hermès. He sketched the anchor-chain bracelet after a walk in a Normandy harbor. Then, in 1956, came the accident no strategy could buy: Life magazine’s cover showed Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco, shielding her pregnancy from photographers with a boxy Hermès bag Dumas had designed in the 1930s. The house renamed it the Kelly. Royalty and Hollywood formed a line.

But the postwar glow ended in drift. The family refused synthetic materials as competitors embraced them, held to leather and silk, kept prices high and output low; by the late 1970s the young saw Hermès as an heirloom — impeccable, and slightly dead. Growth fell behind the arrivistes.

The Man Who Woke the House

Jean-Louis Dumas, Robert’s son, took over in 1978 at forty and proved to be the family’s second founder. He created a watchmaking subsidiary in Switzerland that same year; folded in the English bootmaker John Lobb, and later the crystal house Saint-Louis and the silversmith Puiforcat; and hired provocateurs — a limited collaboration with Jean-Paul Gaultier, then Martin Margiela, the deconstructivist, as womenswear designer in the late nineties. His first advertising campaign said everything: a girl in jeans, silk scarf knotted, perched on an Hermès trunk. Annual sales went from about $50 million when he arrived to $460 million by 1990.

His most famous act was improvised at thirty thousand feet. On a 1984 flight from Paris to London, the actress Jane Birkin, seated beside him, spilled her overstuffed bag and lamented that no one made a proper bag for a young mother; Dumas sketched one with her on an air-sickness bag and named the result for her. The Birkin became the most coveted handbag on earth — a social currency (“When I’m carrying that bag,” a Sex and the City heroine explains, “I’ll know I’ve made it”) and eventually, by some studies, an asset appreciating faster than stocks or gold.

Dumas also made the decision that nearly undid the house: in 1993 he listed Hermès on the Paris bourse, raising capital for expansion while the family kept roughly three-quarters of the shares and votes. “Money can come from the market,” he said, “but the soul must belong to the family.” In 2005 he made his son Pierre-Alexis artistic director; in 2006, weakened by Parkinson’s disease, he handed operations to his deputy Patrick Thomas — the first outsider ever to run Hermès — as a bridge until the sixth generation was ready. He died in 2010, at seventy-two, with revenues near $2 billion and a warning left hanging in the air: to separate the family from Hermès, he liked to say, would be to separate it from its soul.

Project Mercury

Arnault had been circling for a decade. Beginning in 2001, LVMH bought Hermès shares through offshore subsidiaries, each stake kept below the 5 percent disclosure threshold; by 2002 it silently held 4.9 percent. Between 2008 and 2010, equity-swap contracts with a set of banks gave it claim to roughly 13 percent more without a line of public disclosure. The operation had a code name, Mercury — the Roman name of the god Hermes. To find sellers, Arnault reportedly retained a former French intelligence officer to map the family’s weak points: members facing costly divorces, members long settled abroad, members short of cash — any of the two-hundred-odd cousins who together held some 70 percent of the company but individually held slivers, bound by no shareholders’ pact.

The moment he chose was the family’s interregnum: Jean-Louis dead, an outsider in the chief executive’s chair for the first time since 1837. Hence the Saturday phone call; hence the same-day announcement. LVMH kept buying — 22.6 percent by late 2011, 23.1 percent by mid-2013 — until the family’s control had thinned to just above half. Patrick Thomas, ordinarily the mildest of men, answered for the house with a violence that startled France: “If you want to seduce a beautiful woman, you don’t start by raping her from behind.” In letters to shareholders the family called the raid a secret and hostile invasion, and swore it would not stand.

The Standing Vote

What stopped the wolf was a meeting. Early one December morning in 2011, in a private club near the Arc de Triomphe, more than fifty family shareholders assembled — cousins scattered across continents and callings, gathered as one body for the first time in memory. Bertrand Puech put it plainly: “If we do not unite, we will lose Hermès.” The lawyers laid out the plan: pool the bulk of the family’s stock — 62.8 percent of the company — into a holding company, with just over 50.2 percent of the shares, worth about 8 billion euros, locked and unsellable for twenty years, and a third of profits recycled each year into buying back floating stock. It asked every member to surrender two decades of liquidity. Puech asked those in favor to stand. Every person in the room rose at once. “Tonight I am prouder than ever to be a member of this family,” a Guerrand cousin called out. The pact was christened H51, for the majority it locked away.

One man refused. Nicolas Puech, Bertrand’s brother — a solitary figure long settled in Switzerland — kept his 5.7 percent outside the pact and resigned from the board; his earlier sales through intermediaries, investigators concluded, had likely opened the very door LVMH walked through. The family closed ranks without him and counterattacked in court. France’s market regulator, investigating since 2010, fined LVMH 8 million euros in 2013 for concealing its position — financially a rounding error, morally unambiguous. In 2014 came the settlement: LVMH distributed its entire Hermès stake to its own shareholders and pledged, with the Arnault family, to buy none for five years. The handbag war was over. The craftsmen had won.

The man who stood apart became the saga’s strange coda. In 2023 Nicolas Puech surfaced in headlines: he planned to adopt his fifty-one-year-old Moroccan gardener and pass him half a fortune of some $7 billion; he fought the charitable foundation he himself had created in 2011 over his estate; and he claimed that Hermès shares worth roughly $13 billion — 5 to 6 percent of the company — had somehow vanished, accusing his longtime Swiss wealth manager. A Swiss court dismissed the fraud complaint in 2024, citing the sweeping powers of attorney he had signed; Axel Dumas said the company had long since concluded that Puech no longer held the shares. Whatever the truth, the family’s answer was institutional, as always: in 2022 several branches founded a common family office — named Krefeld, after the town where Thierry Hermès was born — to manage the clan’s wealth collectively, so that no cousin would ever again need to sell the shares that hold up the walls.

Borrowed From the Children

“Bernard Arnault did us a great favor,” Axel Dumas has said since. “He reawakened the family’s sense of unity. That battle was our generation’s war.” Axel — Jean-Louis’s nephew, born in 1970, trained in law and seasoned in banking, a child who played in the saddle room of the Faubourg store where his mother was a senior executive — became joint chief executive in 2013 and had the house to himself by 2014, returning a family hand to the wheel. The numbers since read like vindication: more than 300 stores and 25,000 employees; revenues of 15.2 billion euros in 2024 and net profit of 4.6 billion; a market value past 200 billion euros on the richest multiples in the industry, at moments eclipsing even LVMH itself. The family still holds about two-thirds of the company, a bloc lately valued above 160 billion euros — among the greatest fortunes any family holds anywhere.

What Axel spends his authority on, though, is the seventh generation. Twice a year he gathers twenty-odd young cousins for dinner: family history, the cautionary dynasties of Balzac and Thomas Mann, the grammar of stewardship. His refrain: “Each of us is number two. Number one is always Hermès.” Cousins man the posts — Pierre-Alexis Dumas over art, Pascale Mussard over sustainable creation, Guillaume de Seynes over manufacturing, Henri-Louis Bauer over the family holding — and the doctrines hold: no celebrity endorsements (“We have no image policy, only a product policy”), every workshop kept in France, and luxury defined, in a family maxim Axel likes to quote, as that which can be repaired. The house that put a zipper on leather in 1922 put its name on an Apple Watch in 2015, and in 2023 went to court to crush a “MetaBirkin” NFT — adaptive at the edges, immovable at the core. On an upper floor at 24 Faubourg, Émile-Maurice’s office survives as a private museum of carriages, saddles, and curiosities, where members bring their children to hear where they came from.

Bertrand Puech, the elder who took the wolf’s phone call, left the family its best sentence: “I did not inherit Hermès from my parents. I borrowed it from my children.” It is the whole model in fourteen words — no owners, only caretakers, each generation obliged to return the thing better than it was received. The orange box was an accident of wartime scarcity; the carriage on it still waits for no master but the customer; and the family that stitches at the pace of the hand has so far outlasted every force that tried to hurry it. In an industry that sells speed to the impatient, the family’s real product was always time. That remains the one luxury its rivals cannot manufacture.