Hermès at Milan Design Week 2025

At Milan Design Week 2025, Hermès presents an installation that imposes itself not through excess, but through silence. Described as a “search for the object”, the scenography occupies La Pelota, a former 1940s sports hall, and proposes an almost spiritual experience with the French house's new objects for the home.

Under the artistic direction of Charlotte Macaux Perelman and Alexis Fabry, Hermès abandons the artisanal exuberance of recent years to plunge into a radical minimalism: large white boxes, suspended over an equally white floor, create an almost ethereal setting. They are volumes “almost without colour”, as Perelman herself put it, which serve as support for the appearance of colour in its purest form: reflected, projected, suggested.

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Those boxes, true architectural plinths, cast luminous haloes of colour onto the floor, breaking with the austerity of absolute white. The choice of that neutral setting has a purpose: to let the objects, and only they, reveal themselves in their materiality, function and poetry.

“Like the block of marble for a sculptor, the box contains the object, the idea we have of it and the dream it inspires”, said Charlotte Macaux Perelman.

Among the objects presented, each holds a kind of duality: between art and use, between the playful and the technical, between the artisanal gesture and the precision of contemporary design.

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One highlight is the side table in lacquered glass, with a rectangular base and a revolving top in Japanese cedar designed by Tomás Alonso, where the pink set into engraved leather at the centre puts the rigid geometry under tension with an organic and unexpected gesture.

Beside it, a porcelain composition created by Nigel Peake translates into delicate brushstrokes the idea of an imaginary meal: 33 pieces laid out as though awaiting a daily ritual interrupted in time. Every brushstroke echoes the gesture of a silent painter.

In the alcoves of the boxes, Hermès fabrics of hand-woven cashmere are presented as abstract paintings, unfolding a textile palette that challenges both touch and sight.

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And in an almost affectionate gesture, blown glass vases appear dressed in small leather “jackets” in weaves drawn from traditional equestrian blankets, a subtle reference to the house's origins: the horse as past, the object as present, the space as projection.

The installation works as a visual manifesto: colour does not have to shout to be seen. It can emanate, whisper, vibrate. And it is in that dialogue between restraint and intensity that Hermès reaffirms its authority at the crossing of design, art and the poetry of daily life.

The show remains open to the public until 13 April 2025, at via Palermo 10, in Milan, as part of the official programme of Milan Design Week.