In State of the Art, a column for Highsnobiety, Chris Erik Thomas untangles the crossover between fashion and art.

Hermès didn’t become Hermès by taking shortcuts. The uber-luxury label has spent nearly a century transforming itself from a simple harness and saddle workshop into an artisanal powerhouse. Each Birkin and Kelly bag is made by a single trained craftsman, and the house’s signature dual-needle saddle stitch keeps quality tight (while also preserving Hermès’s equestrian heritage). 

Its entire reputation lives or dies on the construction of its products, but this exacting craftsmanship doesn’t just start and stop at its physical goods: the total Hermès package extends all the way to its digital presence. Even in this lazy age of outsourcing creativity to AI, Hermès is devoting itself to the human touch.

Just look at its website. The brand recently brought on artists Sarah Martinon and Armand Béraud to give its digital platform a more personal, handcrafted touch, commissioning Béraud to animate Martinon’s paper illustrations for every section of the Hermès online store. The commission came less than a year after Martinon hand-painted illustrations for the house’s Lugano window displays last December. 

But at Hermès, the commitment to elevating human illustration is as integral to the luxury label's DNA as its signature bags and silk scarves. It just had French animation studio Remembers hand-paint an anime Miss Dior ad and hired over 50 artists to create social media content in 2025. For decades, it’s worked with major artists — from Bauhaus icon Josef Albers and Dutch design legend Karel Martens, to acclaimed photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto — to contribute patterns and prints to its products. 

Hermès is hardly the only fashion brand bringing a handcrafted touch to its visuals. We declared 2026 the year of the fashion illustrator after witnessing artist Annie Choi’s work on the GAP x Sandy Liang collaboration (and Chanel’s Métiers d’art teaser, and Tekla’s animated short film, and Diptyque’s illustrated advent calendar). 

Employing actual artists, graphic designers, and illustrators for your fashion brand really should be a low bar, and yet… this is the era of AI slop ads from Gucci and generative clothing models from Zara and H&M. As industry after industry races to automate its way to “content,” Hermès is staying the course and betting that the most luxurious tool you can use is the one that’s as old as time: the human hand. 

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