Hermes opens the window on ‘overload’ for festive season

Kate Rohde, the Melbourne artist tasked with interpreting Hermes new festive windows, embraced the fashion house’s ‘astonishing’ theme.

Festive season window staged by Hermes. Picture: Wes Nel

For Hermes artistic director and founding family member Pierre Alexis-Dumas, deciding the French luxury house’s annual theme – intended as a unifying philosophy for all who work for the brand – is a question of intuition and context.

“The theme of Hermes is really the result for me of that work on ­intuition,” he said in an interview earlier this year at the Watches & Wonders fair in Geneva.

“I give myself one year to (focus on). I’m focused on 2027 because 2024, 2025, 2026 are already set. Not at the same stage … it has to be a way to look at Hermes which is relevant to Hermes but is also relevant to what I feel the world is going to be, the context of 2027.”

As he elaborated in an interview with WISH magazine in July, the theme is open for interpretation and reimagining for all those in the Hermes universe.

“The theme is a great gift that my father gave me and it’s a great tool for me to be able to talk to the whole community of stylists and designers at Hermes because it’s a large community, but some of them really don’t work together.

“You know Pierre Hardy, who designs shoes and jewellery, doesn’t really look at what we do for the home. They are different teams. It’s a tool that my father devised in the ’80s. He talked to me a lot about it, and it was really his area (where) he could express his own creativity, to come up with an idea which allowed everybody to look at Hermes from a different angle year after year.”

This year’s theme, Astonishing Hermes!, has been handed to Melbourne artist Kate Rohde to interpret for the maison’s festive season windows in Sydney.

Melbourne artist Kate Rohde. Picture: Jesse Marlow

Officially revealed on Wednesday, it will be the largest window display for Hermes in Australia. All Hermes window installations are unique. The theme befits the year that was for the luxury brand, one of the few to defy a slowdown with 28 per cent sales growth in the second quarter.

It aligns with the completion of almost two years of work on the facade of the heritage-listed Trust Building at the intersection of King and Castlereagh streets, home to the Australian flagship store.

For Karin Upton-Baker, managing director of Hermes Australia, the timing is ­advantageous. “We are delighted that the facade restoration of the Trust Building is revealed just in time for Hermes’ collaboration with Kate Rohde … such a significant historic building right in the centre of our city,” she says.

Rohde, who describes her vibrant work as “a bit like the Natural History Museum on acid … a little bit like some sort of deranged historical house (or) … an eccentric sort of aunt’s mansion”, hopes the installation will be a “sensory overload”.

The display includes a tableau of things such as wild resin versions of Hermes’ famous Birkin and Kelly bags – for which Rohde “went down quite a big internet rabbit hole” of research – a working chandelier and a three-seater chair. It reflects a shared affinity between Hermes and Rohde – that all objects, no matter how beautiful, ought to have a purpose. But a spirit of playfulness also is essential.

The wonder of a Christmas window drew Rohde to the project. It is a shared feeling. From analysing foot traffic data this year, David Jones expects more than one million customers to visit its animated Christmas window display, The 12 Dogs of Christmas.

For Rohde there is a connection to childhood that we can find in the joy of festive windows.

“For me they’re very tied to nostalgia,” she says.

“We grew up in the outskirts of Melbourne and going into town was a big thing, and we’d often make the special journey to see the Myer Christmas windows. I love this time of year.”