From Hermès to Chanel, beauty brands are turning to their own origin stories for inspiration.
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When Émile Hermès took the reins of the family’s saddle-making firm in the interwar years, a spirit of leisure class joie de vivre hung in the air. He ushered in handbags and swimsuits; a circa-1930 advertisement shows a beach-going flapper shaded by a striped parasol. “Pour le sport, pour le bain, pour la plage,” reads the copy beneath a map of French tourist cities, plus a bonus inset of New York. It was a soigné invitation to get outdoors.
Nearly a century later, that impulse returns with the debut complexion range from Hermès Beauty—the brand’s young métier whose color-block lipstick cases made a splash in 2020. “Plein Air conveys a certain idea of simplicity, of freedom, of movement and well-being,” says Gregoris Pyrpylis, a Greek-born makeup artist who joined as creative director this year.It’s a sunny day in Normandy, near shoreline horse trails, and Pyrpylis is talking through the line.
“In Greece, your first books are about mythology,” Pyrpylis says, tracing back an early conception of beauty that went beyond the goddess Aphrodite. “There was Athena—so sportive and so powerful, with character.” What is more radiant than a force of nature incarnate?