Hermès Just Made a Bold Statement in the Age of AI |
If you visit the Hermès website in search of a scarf or a handbag, take a close look at the whimsical creatures floating across your screen.
BY FAST COMPANY
[Illustrations: Linda Merad for Hermès]
If you visit the Hermès website in search of a scarf or a handbag, you’ll be greeted by a collection of whimsical sea creatures swimming across the screen. To navigate to the watch section, you’ll click on an image of a watch flanked by an eel. To locate shoes, you’ll click on a loafer with a pelican sitting inside it, as if it were riding in a boat.
These seahorses and fish and eels and starfish are intriguing to the eye. While digitally rendered images are hyper-smooth, symmetrical, and flawless, these pictures bear all the imperfections of a hand-drawn illustration. We see the texture of the paper grain in the background, a slight irregularity in the lines, unevenness in the coloring. In a world of AI-generated images, these pictures feel special, perhaps even luxurious.
Hermès, which unveiled a new website this week, partnered with the French artist Linda Merad to create these images. Merad, whose pen-and-ink illustrations have appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and The Atlantic, specializes in hand-drawn images. It was her old-fashioned, analog process that appealed to the brand. “They wanted to create the impression that the art was made by a human,” Merad explains. “They wanted the viewer to feel the materiality of the drawing.”
For Hermès, it is on-brand to tap a small artist for its imagery. The 188-year-old fashion house has become a luxury giant........