Every twenty-five seconds, someone buys a carré: a 90x90cm silk scarf from French luxury brand Hermès. An estimated 13% of these trademark accessories are sold in Japan, a third of them in one of the capital’s eight major shops. Making one of these scarves, requires the cocoons of approximately 300 silk worms, which feed on the leaves of three mulberry trees. In order to cater to the sales of Tokyo’s stores alone, over 90,000 of those specific trees are necessary. Grow your carré. takes these impressive statistics, and turns them into an imaginary campaign, which stimulates Tokyo-based Hermès clients to adopt the three trees necessary in the production of one silk carré. In return for participation, these patrons can buy an exclusive, limited edition scarf at a discount.
This project utilises the iconic Hermès silks to give an insight in the realities of producing said luxury items on the one hand, and stimulates a small, but still existing domestic textile industry on the other. Hermès wearers will become part of the production process themselves, hosting the compact and easy Mulberry trees in their gardens, balconies and roof terraces all over the city. A special team will take care of maintenance and harvesting, which means that the customer can simply enjoy the green in their outdoor spaces. By stimulating participation among private individuals, Hermès will contribute to a greener – and possibly cleaner – Tokyo, and cultivate an awareness in regards to production processes amongst luxury consumers.
To be able to manage such an operation, it is imagined that Hermès will open a mulberry nursery, to grow the trees that will be distributed among its customers, and a logistics hub, where harvested leaves are collected to go to a silk farm. Once the silk worms have produced their cocoons, they are reeled and woven to a quality silk in Ishikawa prefecture, after which the fine fabric is moved to Kyoto. There, Hermès collaborator Kyoto Marble will print the silk using an almost extinct local marbling technique. All of these production landscapes – from the dispersed orchard of adopted mulberry trees in Tokyo, to the small printing workshop in Kyoto – are brought together in an abstracted pattern, to form the scarf’s actual design.
By overlapping production and consumption landscapes, Grow your carré. stimulates an awareness of the scale of the entire operation, and aims to positively contribute to fostering local craftsmanship and a greener inner city. Through the combination of an aesthetic language typical for Hermès scarves and the abstraction of production landscapes within a long-standing ideal-city-tradition, this project embraces the pleasure of luxury goods, while also pushing an activist agenda. It connects the scales of the urban, the landscape, the interior, and the object, and encourages everyone to find beauty in the complexities of systems facilitating our consumption patterns.
KOOZ What prompted the project?
STEF DINGEN Grow your carré. is my individual contribution to this year’s iteration of The Berlage’s annual Project Global, a collective project in which my colleagues and I have investigated Tokyo through the technocratic vantage point of energy. By looking at Paris as a model metropolis first, we set out to explore the thematic starting from very specific observations. In the case of Grow your carré. an interest in the Parisian fashion industry thus led to Japanese textile production, which was an opportunity to talk about Japan’s early period of industrialisation and the embodied energy of fabrics, as well as a fascinating tradition of producing and consuming luxurious silk items.
KOOZ What questions does the project raise and which does it address?
SD More than anything, this project tries to make visible what kind of resources it takes to create certain consumer goods. In recent years luxury fashion houses have increasingly started sharing so-called savoir-faire content, to give an insight into the craftsmanship that goes into haute couture dresses, leather bags, or spectacular jewellery, but rarely do we get to see where the materials that are being used come from. Grow your carré. is a speculation which aims to start answering the spatial question connected to the very materiality of these products, more specifically the silks being used for Hermès’ carré scarves. Simply put: if three trees are necessary to produce one blank 90x90cm silk scarf, how much space is necessary to fulfil the customers’ need of that item? How should this space be (dis)connected from the shopping experience or the home of the consumer? Does a city like Tokyo even allow for such a production landscape within its dense urban core?
KOOZ What drew you to focus on the iconic carré and the brand of Hermès?
SD Silk has historically been important in French-Japanese relations. In the nineteenth century, Japan helped France recover from the silk worm disease that had ravaged French production, and in return France helped industrialising silk production in Japan. Today, Japan’s silk industry is only a fraction of the enormous industry it once was, but the country has become one of the world’s main destinations for French luxury goods. It has long been the second biggest market for Hermès, a brand which is famous – among others – for its silks. With its intricate designs by artists from all over the world, the carré in particular offered an opportunity to hint at these histories, while also setting an aesthetic framework which I could use to project the idea.
KOOZ How does the project redefine the relationship between seller and customer?
SD I would hope it blurs the boundary between the two. As customers become part of the production chain themselves, they have a different understanding of the products they buy. They are probably on a more equal footing with the sales staff, as they have something of an innate knowledge about these items.
KOOZ What is the potential of the redefinition of this both conceptually and physically to inform the city?
SD The abstract divergence of cost and worth should become more clear, and with it possibly the physical distance between places of consumption and places of production. Although I do not necessarily believe in a utopian model of a self-sustaining city in this regard, I do think it would be good to have moments where the two meet, be it physically or perhaps virtually. Additionally, while this project targets individuals, it aims to create a big participating collective. In a city like Tokyo, where ownership of land is fragmented into relatively small plots, such a strategy might be a way to tackle a variety of other space intensive issues as well.
KOOZ To what extent could this easily transform into the branding of the city? What are the implications of such an expanded 'ownership' by a single brand?
SD For the city of Tokyo Grow your carré. could contribute to uniting the paradoxical ideals of the green city with that of the luxury shopping destination, while for the house of Hermès the campaign is an opportunity to show its commitment to sustainable production and its long-standing pledge to foster craftsmanship. However, as land ownership remains firmly in the hands of private individuals, control also resides with this diverse set of participating customers. Despite the powerful image of the cumulative effect of the campaign as represented in the scarf design, I would argue that this approach really is a quite intimate one. Customers get to wear limited-edition scarves which they have contributed to themselves, by offering bits of space in their private domains. Additionally, once consumers have become more aware of the realities behind the production of the goods they buy, the effect of this campaign should transcend the specificity of the Hermès brand to influence consumption and behaviour at large. Maybe one can do with buying less, and taking care of the items already in one’s possession a bit more.
KOOZ How could the architect and architecture mitigate between the diverse parties to ensure a balanced turn around?
SD The brick-and-mortar shops in Tokyo can play an important role in becoming touchpoints of the campaign, through the design of their shop windows and dedicated campaign spaces. Moreover, the implementation of the mulberry trees in the gardens, roof terraces and balconies of customers should be done carefully, to ensure a pleasant outdoor space, as well as a healthy environment for the adopted trees. The architect in this takes on the role of a generalist, combining elements of landscape architecture and retail design, in relation to Hermès marketing and communication strategies and the practicalities of the production chain.
KOOZ What is for you the architect's most important tool?
SD A Muji 0.38mm gell ink ballpoint pen. Preferably in black, although I have recently discovered navy as a great alternative. Perfect for writing (an underrated activity among architects), scribbling notes in the margins of readings, and quick sketches. As much as I rely on a variety of digital tools, initial ideas rarely materialise on screens.
Bio
Stef Dingen is an architect, designer, and thinker currently based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Having received the Berlage Dutch Scholarship, awarded each year to an outstanding architecture graduate, he is currently pursuing a post-master degree at The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design. Grow Your Carré. is part of the collective Project Global within The Berlage.
