Collection: Products

The World of Vintage Hermes Objects

There is a version of Hermes that most people know, and a quieter one that collectors chase. The first is the house of scarves and handbags. The second is the house of objects. Picture the horse-head letter opener on a study desk, the guilloché silver box on a dresser, the stirrup ashtray beside a bottle of something good. This is the world of vintage hermes decorative pieces, and it is the oldest and most honest expression of what the house has always been.

Collectors Gene is built around that second Hermes. Every vintage hermes piece we source begins with the same question the house itself began with in 1837: how do you make an everyday object beautiful enough to keep for a hundred years. The desk accessories, barware, boxes, and small silver we curate are not fashion. They are the furniture of a considered life. They were made in Paris across the middle of the twentieth century. They were built to be used.

This guide is the reference we wish we had when we started collecting vintage hermes objects. It covers where these vintage hermes pieces come from, and the makers who actually produced them. It gives the vocabulary a serious buyer needs. It shows how to tell a genuine piece from a near-miss, and what the market has done with them. Read it front to back and every vintage hermes object you encounter afterward becomes legible.

A Brief History of Hermes

To understand a vintage hermes object, start with a horse. The entire look of the house runs back to its first workshop. A bit becomes a vintage hermes box hinge; a stirrup becomes an ashtray.

From Harness Maker to House of Luxury

In 1837, Thierry Hermes opened a harness and saddlery workshop in the Grands Boulevards quarter of Paris, on the rue Basse-du-Rempart. The district, in the house's own telling, rang to the sound of horses' hooves. His clients were noblemen and the carriage trade. His distinction was simple and total: the finest leather, worked by hand. His saddle stitch was so sound it held even if a thread broke. The work was good enough to win First Class Medals at the Paris Expositions Universelles of 1855 and 1867. Those honors established Hermes as the finest saddlery in the city.

The founder's son, Charles-Émile Hermes, took the business over and in 1880 moved it to 24 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, near the Palais de l'Élysée. That address remains the Hermes flagship and headquarters to this day, which is a remarkable continuity for any house: the same doorway, on the same street, for well over a century. Here the house began selling to the public. It added saddles to its harnesses. It built an elite clientele across Europe, Russia, the Americas, and Asia. The workshop had outfitted carriages for the Parisian nobility. Now it dressed the horses and homes of a truly international elite. Under the third generation the firm traded as Hermes Frères, and the reputation for craft that Thierry had built was, by then, the most valuable thing the family owned.

The pivot that created the vintage hermes object came next. As the automobile displaced the carriage, Émile-Maurice Hermes extended the house from saddlery into saddle-stitched leather goods. Then came luggage, travel and automotive accessories, scarves, watches, jewelry, and the decorative objects that fill a well-appointed home. The craft did not change. Only its subject did. The same hands that had made a bridle now made a desk set, and they brought the entire equestrian vocabulary with them.

The Equestrian Code in Every Object

This is the single most important thing to understand about a vintage hermes object: the horse is never decoration bolted on afterward. It is the source material. The horse head, the bit, the stirrup, the spur, the curb chain, the horseshoe, these were the working hardware of the original workshop, and they were carried directly into the vintage hermes objects of daily life.

So a vintage hermes letter opener takes the form of a horse's head. The house spent its first decades casting and finishing exactly that kind of form for tack. A vintage hermes catchall balances on a horse bit because the bit was already in the design language. When you hold a genuine vintage desk piece, you are holding a saddlery tradition translated into silver and leather. That continuity separates a real vintage hermes object from a brand that simply prints a horse on something.

The Nautical Thread: Chaîne d'Ancre

Running alongside the equestrian code is a second, quieter one: the sea. On 3 March 1938, Robert Dumas, Émile-Maurice's son-in-law and a future head of the house, registered the Chaîne d'Ancre, an anchor-chain motif drawn from the mooring chains of Normandy harbors. Each link is a long oval crossed by a bar, exactly like a marine anchor chain. It debuted as a silver bracelet and expanded across jewelry. It recurs throughout the vintage hermes object world: on bottle coasters, cufflinks, place-card holders, barware, and boxes. It is often paired with a braided rope motif the house calls cordage. When you see chain links or twisted rope on a vintage hermes piece, you are looking at the maritime half of the house's DNA.

A Guide to Vintage Hermes Key Terms

Every serious collecting category has its own language, and vintage hermes objects are no exception. Learn these terms and the whole market reads more clearly. We have grouped them the way a dealer thinks about them: the motifs, the forms, and the materials.

The Motif Vocabulary

Chaîne d'Ancre. The anchor-chain motif registered in 1938, interlocking oval links each crossed by a bar. The signature nautical code of the house, and one of the most collectible patterns in any vintage hermes object.

Clou de Selle. The saddle nail, a large-headed rivet from harness construction, translated into cufflinks, chopstick finials, and hardware. A direct emblem of the saddlery.

Attelage. The French term for the harness and hitching of a carriage horse, a recurring equestrian theme across Hermes iconography and tableware.

Cordage. The braided-rope motif, the nautical companion to Chaîne d'Ancre, seen on bottle openers, coasters, and barware.

Guilloché. Not a motif but a finish, and the one that defines the best vintage hermes silver. Guilloché is engine-turning: a precise, repeating geometric pattern cut into metal on a lathe, catching light in fine parallel lines. It is the hallmark surface of the house's mid-century silversmith, and a well-cut guilloché field is one of the first things that separates a great vintage hermes object from an ordinary one.

The Object Vocabulary

Vide poche. Literally an empty-pocket, a vintage hermes catchall dish for keys, coins, and the small things that come out of a pocket at the end of the day. In the vintage hermes world these are often modeled as a horse head or balanced on a horse bit.

Tastevin. A shallow silver wine-taster's cup, traditionally used to judge a wine's color and clarity against the reflective metal. Hermes versions, often with a stirrup-form handle, are among the most charming small pieces in the vintage hermes category and are often repurposed today as a catchall or ashtray.

The equestrian lexicon. Horse head, horse bit, stirrup, spur, curb chain, horseshoe. The working hardware of the saddlery, rendered as form. Knowing these lets you read any vintage hermes object at a glance and understand where in the tradition it sits.

The Material Vocabulary

Sterling versus silver plate. Sterling is solid silver and carries a French assay mark. Silver plate is a base metal, usually brass, electroplated with a thin layer of silver, and carries only maker and brand engraving, no assay mark. Both were used by Hermes across the era, and both are collectible, but the distinction matters for value and you should always know which one you are holding.

The Minerva hallmark. The profile of the goddess Minerva, the French assay mark used from 1838 onward to certify solid silver. The first standard indicates .950 silver, the highest French grade; the second indicates .800. Small pieces may instead carry a numeric 925 or 800 mark. If a vintage hermes piece is solid silver, this is the mark you are hunting for.

Barenia and Epsom leather. Barenia is the emblematic Hermes saddle calfskin, oil-soaked and built to develop a deep patina with age, a direct descendant of the saddlery's leather. Epsom is a lighter, embossed, rigid calf that resists scratches and holds its shape. Both appear on leather-clad vintage hermes desk and travel objects.

Saddle stitch. The two-needle hand stitch that originated in the harness workshop and defines Hermes leatherwork. On a leather vintage hermes object, the stitching is a tell: even, tight, and sound.

Vintage Hermes Objects by Category

The vintage hermes catalog is wide, but it clusters into a handful of categories that repeat across decades. Here is how a collector should think about each one, what defines it, and what to look for.

Desk Accessories

The desk is the heart of the vintage hermes object world. This is where the horse-head magnifying glass, the paper holder, the vintage hermes letter opener, the loupe, the tape dispenser, and the pen tray all live. The finest examples are cast with real sculptural quality in the horse's head and finished by hand. The difference between a good example and a great one is usually in the finishing. Look at the crispness of the mane, the weight in the hand, the way the light moves across an engine-turned field. These were not stamped out. They were modeled, cast, and worked by people who understood that a vintage hermes object seen every day has to reward being seen.

A desk piece from this house was meant to sit in daily view on a working desk. That is why the house lavished so much design attention on objects that a lesser maker would have treated as afterthoughts. A magnifying glass is a tool. In the hands of this atelier it became a small sculpture of a horse that also happens to magnify. That dual nature, useful and beautiful at once, is the whole philosophy of the vintage hermes category in miniature. For a collector, a strong desk piece is often the ideal entry into vintage hermes: useful, displayable, and clearly of the house. A well-chosen vintage hermes desk accessory earns its place on a working surface every day. That is exactly why these vintage hermes pieces have held their audience for decades.

Boxes

If desk accessories are the heart, boxes are the backbone. The vintage hermes box runs from cedar-lined humidors to slim silver desk boxes to lacquer-and-brass pieces with a belt-buckle clasp. The best of them combine a guilloché or engine-turned silver exterior with a warm wood interior, and many carry an applied brass H or a horse-bit detail. There is a particular pleasure to a well-made box that a photograph never quite captures. Feel the weight of the lid, the precision of the hinge, the quiet fit of a wood liner that has held its shape for sixty years. A vintage hermes box is a small architecture, and the house treated it as one.

This is the category where the house's range of materials shows most clearly. It runs from the cool restraint of engine-turned silver, to the depth of a lacquer field, to the warmth of cedar and exotic hardwood. It is also where condition and an intact interior matter most. A cracked liner or a sprung hinge tells you the vintage hermes piece was not cared for; a box that still closes with a soft, sure click tells you it was. When we evaluate a box, the interior is the first place we look. A sound vintage hermes box is among the most satisfying objects the house ever made, and a fine vintage hermes box with its original lining rewards the patient buyer.

Barware and Bar Tools

The bar is where the nautical code comes out to play. Vintage hermes barware includes tastevins and wine raters, bottle openers in stirrup and rope forms, champagne stoppers, ice buckets, cocktail stirrers, and bottle coasters worked in the Chaîne d'Ancre chain motif. These are among the most sociable objects the house ever made, built for a table with people around it. They are a natural place for a new collector to begin, because the small pieces remain accessible. Vintage hermes barware brings the house's nautical code to the table, and a piece of vintage hermes barware is as sociable an object as the maison ever produced.

Trays and Catchalls

The vintage hermes vide poche and its cousins, the tray and the covered dish, are a defining form. Look for the horse-head and horse-bit examples in silver and silver plate. A catchall is one of the most useful objects you can own. That is precisely the point. The house believed usefulness was part of what made a vintage hermes object worth keeping. A vintage hermes catchall on an entry table or dresser proves it every day.

Ashtrays and Smoking Accessories

Whether or not you smoke, the vintage hermes ashtray is a superb object. It comes in a stirrup or spur form, in sterling or silver plate, often with an engine-turned interior. Some are part of a fitted smoking set with a matching match holder. Many now lead second lives as catchalls or ring dishes. The smoking sets in their original cases are among the most sought-after vintage hermes objects, because the case both authenticates the vintage hermes piece and completes it.

Cufflinks, Money Clips, and Small Silver

This is the most wearable corner of the vintage hermes world. Chaîne d'Ancre, Clou de Selle, spur, and stirrup cufflinks; belt-form money clips; place-card and menu holders. These small pieces carry the full house vocabulary at a fraction of the size and price of a box or a tray. That makes them a favorite of collectors who want to wear the code rather than shelve it.

Serveware and Tableware

The vintage hermes table runs from silver and wood chopsticks to porcelain plates. The equestrian heritage carries into porcelain lines that reference the house's origins directly, and the vintage hermes silver serving pieces, bells, and chopstick sets round out a category built for entertaining. Tableware is where a vintage hermes object most naturally becomes part of daily life rather than a display piece. A vintage hermes serving piece or a set of vintage hermes chopsticks turns an ordinary table into something considered.

Clocks and Objets

At the edges of the category sit the travel clocks in leather cases, the desk compendiums, and the sculptural objets that defy a tidy label. These are often the rarest vintage hermes pieces and the ones that most reward a patient collector, because they turn up infrequently and seldom twice in the same form. A rare vintage hermes clock or objet is the kind of vintage hermes piece a serious collector waits years to find.

The Makers Behind Vintage Hermes Objects

Here is the knowledge that separates a serious vintage hermes collector from a casual one. Hermes designed and retailed these vintage hermes objects, but for much of the mid-century it did not make them alone. The vintage hermes silver and the finest desk pieces came from named ateliers and designers, and knowing those names is the single most powerful tool a collector has. Attribution is where value lives.

Ravinet d'Enfert

If you learn one maker's name, learn this one. Ravinet d'Enfert was the Parisian silversmith responsible for a great many of the silver and silver-plate desk, smoking, and bar objects retailed under the Hermes Paris name. The house took its name in 1891, when Charles d'Enfert partnered with the silversmith Louis Ravinet. It worked for more than a century from premises in the Marais, before closing in the 1980s. Its specialty was fine silver, and its signature was the crisp engine-turned guilloché finish that defines the best vintage hermes silver of the 1930s and again the 1960s and 1970s.

You might find a vintage hermes horse-head letter opener, a guilloché box, a tastevin, or a smoking set from this era. Ravinet d'Enfert is very often the atelier that actually made it. The relationship worked the way the best luxury partnerships do. Hermes brought the design language and the name. The silversmith brought a century of skill at working the metal. The guilloché fields on these vintage hermes pieces prove that skill. Engine-turning is unforgiving work. It is cut on a lathe, with no room to correct a wandering line. A Ravinet d'Enfert field is cut cleanly and evenly across the whole surface. Its maker's mark is a lozenge, with the initials R and D separated by a clover leaf and an ampersand beneath. It appears alongside the Hermes Paris engraving on many of the category's best pieces. For a collector, a confirmed Ravinet d'Enfert attribution is one of the strongest signals a vintage hermes object can carry. Much of the finest vintage hermes silver on the market today came from this one atelier. A Ravinet d'Enfert mark elevates a vintage hermes object above its unmarked peers.

Paul Dupré-Lafon

The second name to know belongs to a designer, not a silversmith. Paul Dupré-Lafon lived from 1900 to 1971. He was a French decorator, so tied to a wealthy private clientele that he earned the nickname "the decorator of millionaires." He never exhibited in the salons and worked only for an elite few. Beginning around 1929, he did a great deal to shape the Hermes design language that the house still carries today.

For Hermes, Dupré-Lafon designed the leather-and-metal desk universe: desk sets, blotters, lamps, valets, grooming pieces, and the compendium desk clocks that combine several instruments in one object. He favored rich materials, Macassar ebony, rosewood, box-calf leather, bronze, worked in restrained, geometric forms, and he had a habit of turning functional details like exposed screws into ornament. A vintage hermes object attributable to Dupré-Lafon sits at the very top of the category. His furniture reaches the highest prices the market has recorded. A Dupré-Lafon vintage hermes piece sits at the very summit of the field.

Maria Pergay

The third name is a designer who bridged display art and objet. Maria Pergay created window displays for Hermes in the 1950s before her celebrated career in furniture, and she produced boxes and objects carrying her signature motifs of belts, braids, and tassels. Her silver-plated belt-series boxes and her lacquer-and-brass pieces with belt-buckle clasps are the vintage hermes objects to look for under her hand. They turn up rarely and reward the vintage hermes collector who recognizes them.

A Note on Puiforcat

One clarification saves collectors from a common error. Puiforcat, the great French silver house, is owned by the Hermes group, which acquired it in 1993, and today serves as the group's in-house silversmith. But Puiforcat is generally not the maker of the classic mid-century vintage hermes desk and barware objects. That distinction belongs to Ravinet d'Enfert. A modern Hermes-branded silver piece bearing a Puiforcat connection is a different thing from a vintage 1930s-to-1970s object, and the two should never be confused when you are evaluating a vintage hermes piece. Knowing which maker stands behind a vintage hermes object is the single most useful skill a collector can build.

How to Authenticate a Vintage Hermes Object

Authentication is where new buyers lose money, because the vintage hermes object market is full of near-misses: generic mid-century equestrian pieces, silver plate sold as sterling, and modern items dressed up as vintage. A genuine vintage hermes object announces itself through several converging tells, and a careful collector checks all of them rather than any one alone.

The Engraving

The first tell is the mark on the vintage hermes object itself. Look for the HERMÈS PARIS engraving, or the fuller HERMÈS 24 Faubourg Saint-Honoré Paris. This is the house signature, and its font, depth, and placement should look confident and correct. A hesitant, shallow, or misspelled engraving is a warning.

The Hallmarks

The second tell is the metal. On solid silver, hunt for the French Minerva head, the first standard for .950 and the second for .800, or a numeric 925 or 800 mark on smaller pieces. On silver plate you will find no assay mark, only the maker and brand engraving. That absence is itself information. It tells you the vintage hermes piece is plate, not sterling. That is fine, as long as you are pricing it as plate.

The Maker's Mark

The third tell is the atelier. On the silver desk, smoking, and bar objects, look for the Ravinet d'Enfert maker's mark, the R and D separated by a clover leaf with an ampersand beneath, sitting alongside the Hermes Paris stamp. A confirmed maker's mark both authenticates the vintage hermes object and raises its standing a lot.

The Case and the Construction

The fourth tell is context. An original fitted case, marked HERMÈS 24 Faubourg Saint-Honoré Paris, clearly raises both confidence and value, especially on smoking sets. Beyond the marks, the vintage hermes object itself should show the house's hand: crisp guilloché, quality casting on horse-head handles, a cedar lining that fits, saddle-stitching that is even and tight. A genuine vintage hermes object feels resolved in a way a copy does not.

Weight is one of the most reliable tells. It is also the hardest to fake. Solid silver has a density that base metal cannot match, and a vintage hermes piece that feels light for its size deserves a second look. Provenance is the other quiet signal a careful buyer weighs. A documented chain of ownership, an old receipt, an auction record, or a vintage hermes piece from a known estate all carry more confidence than a piece with no history at all. None of these is decisive on its own. Together, they build the case. A reputable dealer will be glad to walk through each of them with you, rather than asking you to take the vintage hermes piece on faith.

The Common Pitfalls

Finally, know what fools people. The most frequent error is confusing silver plate with sterling. The second is misattributing a generic equestrian object. Other houses and unbranded French makers produced similar horse-head letter openers and stirrup pieces. An equestrian motif alone is not proof of Hermes. The third is treating a modern piece as vintage. When any of the converging tells is missing, slow down. The best protection when buying a vintage hermes object is simple. Buy from a dealer who authenticates in-house and stands behind the vintage hermes piece. That is exactly how we operate.

The Vintage Hermes Market

The market for vintage hermes objects behaves differently from the market for Hermes handbags, and understanding that difference is the key to buying well. Where bags and scarves dominate the big auction houses, the vintage hermes objects trade mostly through design-focused auction rooms and specialist dealers. That structure keeps the category quieter, less speculative, and more driven by connoisseurship than by hype, which is good news for a collector who wants to buy on merit.

The Price Bands

Vintage hermes objects sort into three broad price bands, and knowing them lets you shop with a clear head.

The entry band covers small barware, cufflinks, place-card holders, and the smaller silver, and it runs from the low hundreds into the high hundreds. This is where most collectors begin, and it is a genuinely rewarding place to start, because a small vintage hermes object carries the full design language at an accessible price.

The middle band covers sculptural desk pieces, letter openers, catchalls, and the like, and it runs from roughly a thousand into the low thousands. This is the meat of the category and where a serious collection takes shape.

The top band covers silver boxes, humidors, engine-turned statement pieces, complete smoking sets, and above all the designer furniture. Silver boxes and humidors reach into the thousands, and the finest Dupré-Lafon furniture has realized figures into the tens and even hundreds of thousands at auction. A vintage hermes object at this level is as much a design buy as a decorative one.

What Drives Value

Seven factors move the price of a vintage hermes object, and they compound. First and largest is maker attribution, a confirmed Ravinet d'Enfert or, at the summit, a Dupré-Lafon. Second is the motif, with the strongest equestrian and nautical house codes earning a premium. Third is metal, sterling over plate. Fourth is workmanship, above all a crisply cut guilloché field. Fifth is condition and honest patina. Sixth is the original fitted case. Seventh is rarity of form. A vintage hermes piece that stacks several of these, a cased, sterling, Ravinet d'Enfert horse-head object in fine condition, sits at the strong end of its band.

The Trend

The broad direction of the vintage hermes object market is upward and, more interestingly, deepening. Collectors more and more prize logo-light objects that speak through design and house codes rather than overt branding, and the mid-century objets sit squarely in that taste. The designer names behind the category, Dupré-Lafon in particular, are drawing rising recognition beyond the auction circuit. For a collector, the takeaway is straightforward: buy the best attributed, best-conditioned vintage hermes object you can, and time tends to be on your side. The vintage hermes market rewards patience and knowledge in equal measure, and a well-bought vintage hermes piece rarely disappoints its owner.

Vintage Hermes Compared to the Field

A collector rarely considers a vintage hermes object in isolation. Two comparisons come up constantly, and both help clarify what makes the Hermes object distinct.

Hermes versus Gucci

Gucci built its own equestrian object world in the same era, and the overlap is real. Gucci's 1970s barware, desk sets, horsebit bookends, stirrup cups, and ashtrays lean on the horsebit and snaffle as the house signature, just as Hermes leans on the horse head, bit, and stirrup. The difference is character and construction. Gucci objects run to brass, bamboo, gilt metal, and the green-and-red web, with an Italian, dolce-vita exuberance. A vintage hermes object runs to French silver and silver plate executed by a dedicated silversmith, with engine-turned refinement and a more restrained, saddlery-derived austerity. Hermes pieces carry French assay hallmarks; Gucci pieces generally do not. For the vintage hermes collector, Gucci is the playful, more affordable equestrian alternative. The Hermes object, with its named-maker pedigree and precious-metal content, holds the edge at the top of the market.

Hermes versus the French Silver Houses

The other comparison is to Christofle and Puiforcat, the great French silver houses. Christofle is the broad, culturally dominant name in French silver plate, the house that furnished ocean liners and grand hotels. Puiforcat is the connoisseur's sterling house, defined by Art Deco geometry and the highest silver standard. Both are, first and last, tableware houses. Hermes sits adjacent but apart. It never was a silversmith itself; it commissioned Ravinet d'Enfert. Its objects are prized less as pure silver and more as equestrian and nautical design objects that carry an clear house identity. The positioning is clean. Choose Christofle for accessible plated table silver, Puiforcat for museum-grade sterling design, and the vintage hermes object for the equestrian objet with a story in every line.

Expert Opinions on Vintage Hermes Objects

Our view, after years of sourcing and handling these vintage hermes pieces, is that the vintage hermes object is one of the most under-appreciated corners of the entire luxury market. The handbag world absorbs the attention and the headlines. In its shadow, the vintage hermes objects that most purely express the house's craft trade at a fraction of the price. They reward their owners every single day. This is the quiet case for vintage hermes as a collecting category: genuine craft, honest provenance, and objects made to be lived with rather than locked away.

The advice we give most often is to buy the vintage hermes object you will actually use. A vintage hermes catchall belongs by the door, a tastevin belongs on the bar, a letter opener belongs on the desk. These vintage hermes pieces were designed to be handled. They age into something better the more they are lived with, developing the patina that a genuine vintage hermes object wears like a signature. The collector who buys only to shelve is missing half of what the house intended.

A word on care, since these are objects meant to be handled. Silver plate and sterling both develop a natural patina. The instinct to polish everything to a mirror is worth resisting. Over-polishing wears the high points of an engine-turned field, and softens the crispness that gives the piece its value. A gentle dusting and the occasional light clean are enough for most pieces, and a cedar-lined box will hold its scent for decades if it is kept dry and out of direct sun. Leather responds to the same restraint: a quality conditioner once or twice a year, no more. Treated this way, a well-made object outlasts its owner, which is rather the point.

The second thing we tell people is to buy on attribution and condition rather than on impulse. A cased, sterling, Ravinet d'Enfert vintage hermes object in honest condition will hold its interest and its value across any trend cycle, because it sits on genuine craft and a genuine name. The piece bought for a fleeting reason rarely does. The vintage hermes objects that have rewarded their owners most are, almost without exception, the ones those owners genuinely loved. A vintage hermes object bought for love outlasts one bought for trend, every time.

Frequently Asked Questions About Vintage Hermes

Why collect vintage Hermes objects?

Because they are the purest, least logo-driven expression of the house's founding craft. They are saddlery and metalwork translated into the objects of daily life. They are made by named ateliers to the same standard as the house's more famous products, at prices far below handbags. A vintage hermes object gives you the whole aesthetic of the house in a form you can keep and use for a lifetime.

Do vintage Hermes objects hold their value?

Attributed pieces do, and well. Silver boxes and humidors reach into the thousands, and designer furniture into far higher figures. Dealer demand for strong vintage hermes objects is steady. By most measures it is deepening, as collectors turn toward logo-light design. As with anything, the individual piece matters: attributed, well-conditioned, motif-rich objects perform best.

How do I authenticate vintage Hermes silver?

Look for four converging tells. First, the HERMÈS PARIS engraving. Second, the French Minerva hallmark for solid silver, or a 925/800 numeric mark. Third, the Ravinet d'Enfert maker's mark of an R and D split by a clover leaf. Fourth, ideally, an original fitted case. When one of these is missing on a supposed vintage hermes object, proceed carefully, and prefer a dealer who authenticates in-house.

Who made vintage Hermes desk pieces?

Hermes designed and retailed them, but the silver was largely made by the Parisian silversmith Ravinet d'Enfert, and the leather-and-metal desk universe was designed by Paul Dupré-Lafon. Knowing those two names is the most useful piece of knowledge a vintage hermes collector can carry.

What is a vide poche?

A vide poche is a catchall, literally an empty-pocket, a small dish for the keys and coins that come out of a pocket at day's end. In the vintage hermes world these are often modeled as a horse head or balanced on a horse bit, and they are among the most useful objects you can own.

What is Chaîne d'Ancre?

Chaîne d'Ancre is the anchor-chain motif Hermes registered in 1938, drawn from the mooring chains of Normandy harbors: interlocking oval links each crossed by a bar. It is the nautical counterpart to the equestrian code and appears across vintage hermes barware, cufflinks, and objects.

Are vintage Hermes objects a good investment?

They can be, with the usual caveats. Attributed, motif-rich, sterling, well-conditioned, cased pieces perform best; plainer later pieces can lag. The soundest approach is to buy a vintage hermes object for its design and provenance first and treat any appreciation as a bonus. A well-chosen vintage hermes object tends to hold its value because it sits on genuine craft. The vintage hermes pieces that reward their owners are the ones that were worth owning on their own terms.

Explore Vintage Hermes at Collectors Gene

Every vintage hermes object we offer is sourced and vetted with the standards described in this guide. That means attribution where it can be established, honest condition, and the marks and construction that tell the truth about a vintage hermes piece. New vintage hermes objects arrive with our Friday drops, and domestic shipping is always free. Whether you are buying your first vintage hermes piece or adding to a deep collection, we are glad to help you find the right one.

If you own a vintage hermes object you are considering parting with, or you are looking for a particular piece, we would like to hear about it. Reach us any time at info@collectorsgene.com, or offer a piece through the Sourcing form on our site. The story of a good object is never finished. It simply passes to the next person who was born with the collectors gene, and the story of a vintage hermes object is never truly finished.

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