By Andrew Russeth 9/01/11 8:59am

Luxury

The Hermès Birkin bag. (Photo: Hermès)

Profits Soar at Hermès, as the Wealthy Keep Spending

With the season’s first major art auctions still more than a month away, The Observer has been looking for hints about the state of demand in the art market. At the Art Basel art fair in June, dealers reported that clients were spending freely, but we wanted to know just how intensely they are doing so.

And so this news caught our eye: high-end Parisian fashion house Hermès announced that its profits for the first half of the year jumped a jaw-dropping 50 percent over the previous year, with revenues climbing an astounding 21.5 percent, to €1.31 billion ($1.89). Read More

By Cora Lewis 7/14/10 9:30pm

CovetIt's in the Bag

Vintage Hermes Soars at Christie’s

At Christie’s auction house in London today, bidders spent lavishly on a painter’s palette of purses, and the highest prices paid were for the most unusually-colored bags.

 A violet crocodile Birkin bag sold for $55,726 hours ago, well above its pre-sale estimate, breaking no records, but adding a vivid hue to the collection of one buyer. While not every bag Read More

By Cora Lewis 7/14/10 1:06am

Covet

Christie’s Sells Vintage Hermès Bags

In 1956, the actress Grace Kelly-and Princess of Monaco-used an Hermès bag to cover the bulge of her pregnancy on the cover of Life magazine. Instantly, the bag became an object of romance and desire for women around the world, and the fashion house renamed and refashioned the bag in honor of the royal superstar. Read More

By Chris Shott 9/23/08 10:18pm

The Tie Jones Average

Ask anyone around Wall Street these days: Are bankers still buying ties? Inevitably, someone will respond, “What, to hang themselves?”

“Isn’t this a cool tie?” gushed an eager saleswoman at the chic Hermès boutique at 15 Broad Street, conveniently across from the New York Stock Exchange.

It was a lustrous, sky-blue tie, made Read More

By Lysandra Ohrstrom 5/07/08 6:44pm

Wall Street Location Boosts Global Hermes Sales

Hermès, the French luxury brand that birthed the Birkin bag and all sorts of other status symbols, announced that global sales rose 13.4 percent to 415.1 million euros—that’s $642.9 million now, ouch!—year-over-year in the first three months of 2008.

Surprisingly, gains were felt on both sides of the Atlantic, with U.S. sales rising 23 Read More