Hermes has opened a massive new 20,250 sq ft store on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, located on the corner of Madison Avenue and 63rd, just a block from Central Park and directly across the street from its former store, now closed, which opened in 2000. The major flagship was conceived as ‘the expression of Hermes in New York,
The store is formed of two buildings, now combined, one being a former bank and a listed building, inside, a series of rooms flow from ‘salon to salon.
A handful of special designs were exclusively created for the new Madison store, including ‘Kelly’ bags of all scales, two new watches, a jukebox and a bicycle that bears the store address printed on its frame. Five dedicated onsite artisans – another 6,000 are employed in France – will be stationed in their own private atelier, working on-site on leather, jewellery and horology.
Hermes consistently finds inspiration from nature; here, the store feels built from the roots up, leading up to the light-flooded top floor where a motif of leafy branches artfully wraps the entirety of the top floor ceiling before reaching an expansive skylight. The branches were rendered in fibreglass and were a feat of engineering to create and install, yet in true Hermès fashion appear to exist there effortlessly.
Elsewhere, patterns from the underside of mushrooms are blown up and transformed into jacquard wall coverings (there are no printed fabrics at all used in the store design), specially commissioned by textile artist Grethe Sorensen. (In 2021, the French house made moves to explore working with mycelium leather in collaboration with American company MycoWorks.)
