Hermès Festival des Metiers: Silk Scarves

March 13, 2011 | Chicago Street Fashion, Fashion Events, Gold Coast, Hermes, Streetstyle

Hermes scarves on display

It is no surprise that Hermès is one of my favorite brands to feature on Chicago Streetstyle Scene. So imagine my delight when I heard about the Festival des Metiers (Festival of Crafts) to be held at the Oak Street boutique. I was beyond overjoyed at the chance to see how my favorite luxury goods are made. Even better, I was invited to the private VIP opening party on Thursday night to celebrate the event. Personally, I own two Hermès items – the limited-edition Chicago scarf in fuchsia and a light blue twilly.

My limited-edition Chicago scarf

I am obsessed with Hermès textiles so I spent most of my time at the Hermès private opening party watching the expert silk screener create a scarf from start to finish. Below are photos from each step of the process. This was definitely the most popular presentation of the evening.

Attendees watching the scarf demonstration

1. Step one: the artist creates the scarf design.

2. A second artist uses ink to draw each color on a different transparent sheet. Through a translator, she explained how difficult it is to take a multicolored design and think in terms of gray. The way the silk screening process works is that each color is laid down separately. The metal screens are created using these stencils.

3. When the scarves are ready to be printed, the first metal plate is laid down on a moving rail. Up to 50 scarves are printed in one single line like this.

4. The screener moves from each silk square one-by-one, using a squeegee to transfer the dye through the plate onto the silk.

5. The scarf outline is always the first design laid down in black dye.

6. The darkest colors are laid down first. This is a burgundy purple dye for the third layer. The second run was actually the Hermes copyright, which is done separately because the accent mark requires a different consistency of ink)