As Luxe As It Gets

By MARGOT HORNBLOWER PARIS

Jean-Louis Dumas won't sit still. He wants you to feel the sleeve of his cashmere jacket, listen to the ping of his crystal goblet, ponder the intricate pattern of his silk tie. He wants you to follow him out a side door of his elegant office and down a back staircase to a craftsman's workshop virtually unchanged since the 19th century. All the while, he is rhapsodizing, "This is amazing! This is unique! This is fantastique!" In the workshop, with a view across the roofs of Paris, a leatherworker hand-stitches one of four golf bags ordered by a Tokyo real estate developer. The material: fire- engine-red Indonesian crocodile hide. Price: $23,763 each.

Money is not the issue for customers of Hermes, a onetime harness shop founded in 1837 by Dumas's great-great-grandfather. The object is mystique. Princess Grace of Monaco christened the "Kelly handbag," a boxy Hermes classic she often carried. Wearing an Hermes scarf, Queen Elizabeth adorns a postage stamp. Lauren Bacall still slips into an Hermes shop to pick up leatherbound datebooks, and Gregory Peck to be fitted for handmade shoes. But if the rich and racy have always known about Hermes, it is only recently that a New Jersey stockbroker or a Dallas debutante has been able to buy a piece of the dream in her own hometown.

The rapid expansion of a once sleepy, snobbish concern into a global retailing empire is a triumph for Dumas, 52, one of 17 cousins who control 87% of the firm. A silver-tongued swashbuckler who spent a year as an assistant buyer for Bloomingdale's in Manhattan, Dumas has boosted Hermes annual sales ninefold, to $460 million, since he took over in 1978. Moving aggressively into the U.S. and the Far East, he has opened 80 new shops, bringing the total to 238. Thirty more are planned. "Dumas is one of the brightest retailers in the world," says Stanley Marcus, chairman emeritus of the Neiman-Marcus stores. Marcus owns 175 Hermes silk ties, hand-screened and hand-hemmed at $95 each. "It is a status symbol," he admits. "But it is also the finest quality tie made anywhere."

Ties and scarves account for 43% of Hermes sales. But Dumas is channeling growth into new areas by acquiring such choice firms as John Lobb, the prestigious British shoemaker, and Cristalleries de St. Louis, the 223-year- old French glassware manufacturer. Fancy a pair of calfskin-clad garden shears? (They will set you back $475.) A jungle-print bath towel? ($525.) A suitcase made of carbon fiber, adapted from the sheathing on the European Space Agency's Ariane rocket? ($5,450.) Dumas has expanded the product line to 30,000 items.

In the world of luxury, which ranks alongside aerospace as France's primary % export industry, Hermes likes to call itself "a firm apart." It has resisted predatory takeover artists who have swallowed up such venerable family strongholds as Louis Vuitton and Lanvin. It has refused to license its name to sell discount luggage a la Pierre Cardin or mass-produced hosiery a la Christian Dior. But what really makes Hermes different is its stubborn adherence to century-old manufacturing techniques. "Hermes is an anachronism," says Gene Pressman, executive vice president of Barney's, the upscale clothing chain. "It's about quality that's made to last."

Today if a woman wants to buy a calfskin Kelly bag ($2,850), she often must endure a wait of as much as a year. Like all of Hermes' leather goods, the bags are saddle stitched by hand and finished off in melted beeswax in the workshops over its store on the Rue du Faubourg-St.-Honore. Each bag is made from scratch, one by one, by a team of two workers who stamp their insignia inside. If the bag needs repair, even 10 years after it is sold in Singapore or Seattle, it is shipped back to the original craftsmen.

In clothing, which represents about 12% of sales, Dumas has broadened the company's designs beyond its trademark saddlery patterns. But his refusal to give celebrity billing to individual designers has made for mixed results. Nonetheless, the back-to-basics fashion trend, which favors natural fibers and hides, is successfully attracting younger customers.

Unlike many French companies, Hermes uses local talent to guide overseas operations. Says Chrysler Fisher, an Oklahoman who is president of U.S. operations: "The word elitist makes my blood curdle." Fisher has installed a toll-free phone number to make Hermes products available "to any customer in Des Moines." A postman in Waco, Texas, became Hermes' first U.S. designer after drawing scarves featuring a Pawnee Indian chief and a wild turkey.

While Hermes plans to move its workshops and offices to larger quarters in the Paris suburbs next spring, Dumas vows that the company's standards must never suffer. Just to make sure, he recently restructured the firm into a limited partnership that sets up a "Fort Knox" of family control, even if Hermes makes a public stock offering. Promises Dumas: "We will continue to make things the way the grandfathers of our grandfathers did."