Founded in 1837 by Thierry Hermès as a harness workshop in the Grands Boulevards quarter of Paris, the house first dressed the horses of Europe's nobility. Its earliest commissions were wrought for coronations and carriages — leather measured against the gait of a horse.

Through six generations of the Dumas family, Hermès expanded from saddlery into the objects that now define it: the Haut à Courroies, the Kelly (named for Grace Kelly in 1956), and the Birkin, sketched on an airplane sick-bag in 1984 after a chance encounter between Jane Birkin and Jean-Louis Dumas.

Every Hermès bag is saddle-stitched by a single artisan — two needles and waxed linen thread, a seam that can be re-stitched but never cut. A Birkin takes roughly eighteen to twenty-four hours of hand work, and a craftsman's signature is pressed, blind, into the leather.