Hermès petit h in Hawaiʻi

Look Again: Hermès petit h and Marques Hanalei Marzan in Honolulu

In Honolulu, Hermès’ mischievous petit h workshop meets the material intelligence of Hawaiian fiber artist Marques Hanalei Marzan. The result is a spirited conversation about craftsmanship, cultural memory and the radical pleasure of looking at what already exists, then looking again.

One morning in Paris, I left the polished glamour of central Paris behind and made the short journey to Pantin. The distance was modest, but the shift felt decisive.Inside the petit h workshop, the team had quietly rearranged the usual choreography of luxury. Nothing appeared to be waiting obediently for a collection, a season or a marketing calendar. Leather offcuts, porcelain fragments, silk carrés and improbable bits of hardware seemed suspended between identities. The atmosphere was calm, almost conspiratorial. It felt like entering an alternative Hermès reality, one where the studio had released beautiful materials from their original responsibilities and invited them to become stranger.

That sense of creative mutiny will travel rather well to Honolulu this August. From August 7 through 23, Hermès’ Ala Moana Center boutique will host the latest petit h presentation. Hawaiian and Oceanic fiber artist Marques Hanalei Marzan designed the installation for it.The guest list of objects is already behaving badly. A banana and a pear have become patchwork poufs, while a freestanding horse has taken employment as a shelf. Meanwhile, a wicker basket has acquired wheels and abandoned domestic life for skateboarding. The space also features a balancing shelf. It holds a terracotta jar, a leather globe, a yellow Soleil d’Hermès vase and an azure-colored surfboard. It sounds less like a furniture collection than the aftermath of a very chic fever dream.

Creation in Reverse: Inside the Pantin Workshop

Pascale Mussard, a sixth-generation member of the Hermès family, established petit h in 2010. Observers describe its method as “creation in reverse.“ The workshop avoids beginning with a drawing and ordering materials to make it real. Instead, it starts with what is already there. This includes leather too small or irregular for another métier, silk with a printing fault, and porcelain or crystal falling short of exacting standards. It also features unused clasps, returned saddles and components that have slipped out of the conventional production story.

The process avoids flattening these materials into the anonymous category of waste. Their peculiarities are the point. A flaw in crystal, the dimensions of an offcut or the curve of a saddle tree becomes an instruction. In Pantin’s materials store, shelves rise with silk, leather, textiles, porcelain, metal and crystal in a profusion of colors and textures. Artists and artisans handle them, unfold them, test their weight and attempt unlikely introductions. The hand thinks before the sketch has time to become bossy.

The Leadership of Godefroy de Virieu at Hermès petit h

Since 2018, the workshop has been led by Godefroy de Virieu, an industrial designer trained at ENSCI in Paris. As he has explained, the team does not begin by drawing an object and then giving it shape; the materials determine the outcome. This is not the absence of design, but a different order of it. Petit h depends on exacting technical skill because its propositions are so unorthodox. A saddle tree can suggest a guitar, but someone must still make the instrument playable. Porcelain fragments may become furniture, but whimsy alone will not keep a table standing.

De Virieu resists the idea that petit h should possess a tidy visual signature. “I don’t want petit h to have a style,” he explained. “The materials give it one.” The result is less a collection than a family of charming eccentrics, united not by appearance but by attitude. They share an appetite for usefulness, surprise and the delicious moment when the previous life of an object remains visible inside the new one. Luxury, for once, loosens its collar and becomes considerably more interesting at dinner.

Global Itineraries and Collaborative Craft

Petit h has a permanent home at Hermès on rue de Sèvres in Paris, yet travel remains embedded in its imagination. International stopovers create collaborations with artists and designers who respond to the places in which the work appears. In New York in 2024, Dominican American artist Lucia Hierro filled Maison Madison with a unique visual language. It drew inspiration from bodegas, dry cleaners, street signs, milk crates and uptown neighborhoods. For a 2017 Seoul presentation, Korean artist Yeondoo Jung invited designer Sanghyeok Lee. Together, they created display tables inspired by the “Listen to Your Hands” project. In Osaka, Shinsuke Kawahara developed staging that looked toward the origins of manga. Elsewhere, specific locations have inspired unique creations. These include a falcon stand and incense holder in Dubai, a silk hammock in Bangkok, and a dragon bookcase in Beijing.

Honolulu, however, must not function as the next colorful pin on a luxury travel map. Marzan is not a decorative “local artist” whom someone enlisted to supply an agreeable Hawaiian accent. He works as a Hawaiian and Oceanic fibers culture bearer, contemporary visual artist, mentor and museum professional. His practice draws on genealogy, community and the active transmission of knowledge.

Material Intelligence and Cultural Continuity in Honolulu

Born and raised in Kāneʻohe, Marzan explores multiple artistic mediums. His practice spans plaiting, twining, netting, cord-making, weaving, and sculpture, alongside installation and forms made for the body. He trained with respected master weavers Julia Minerva Kaʻawa and Esther Kakalia Westmoreland. Furthermore, he promotes sustainable gathering practices while teaching Hawaiian fiber techniques and Indigenous values to new generations. His relationship to weaving begins not with an aesthetic trend, but with family.

Marzan’s great-grandmother was the last lauhala weaver in his family before him. She died before he was born, but her hats and mats remained. As he grew up, his mother told him who had made them and why they mattered. While still in high school, he attended a lauhala class at Bishop Museum. The objects he had known as family history became an invitation to continue it.

Marzan earned a degree in fiber arts at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. There, he studied customary Hawaiian and Oceanic techniques while experimenting with contemporary and found materials. In a 2004 interview, he recalled a liberating realization. He understood that he could use a piece of plastic or find some rubbish on the ground and make something. The statement creates an obvious point of contact with petit h, yet one should avoid making the connection too neatly. Hermès’ dormant materials arrive from a luxury production system. Marzan’s materials participate in relationships among people, place, genealogy and knowledge. The methods may rhyme; their histories are not interchangeable. In many ways, Hermès petit h, shares this deep-rooted philosophy of transformation.

Trust in Material Intelligence: The Spirit of Hermès petit h

What connects them most persuasively is trust in material intelligence. Marzan has described the inhibition falling away when fiber is in his hands. “I allow the material to move itself and my hands are just the vehicle for it to come into being,” he told Honolulu Magazine in 2019. It is a beautiful description of creative fluency, but also of humility. The artist does not conquer the material. He listens closely enough to collaborate with it.

Preserving Cultural Memory and Indigenous Resilience

Marzan brings that same thinking to his work as Cultural Advisor and the Wayne Pitluck and Judith Pyle Curator for Cultural Resilience at Bishop Museum. There, he advocates for Indigenous voices and knowledge systems within museum practice, helping communities engage with ancestral creative expressions held in collections. His work insists that culture stays alive by refusing to stay sealed under glass. Continuity requires use, interpretation, exchange and, sometimes, audacious new form. Continuity through such creative exchange is at the heart of the Hermès petit h philosophy, which honors both the history of the materials and the local stories they encounter.

His 2025 public sculpture Kauikamauliola at Thomas Square makes the point at architectural scale. Inspired by kōkō puʻupuʻu, customary Hawaiian knotted carrying nets, the work uses stainless steel, copper and synthetic rope to form four suspended vessels. Thomas Square connects with Lā Hoʻihoʻi Ea, Sovereignty Restoration Day, commemorating the restoration of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s sovereignty in 1843. Marzan’s nets symbolically safeguard the histories held by that place. The materials are contemporary, yet they maintain their deep cultural responsibility intact.

Nānā i ke kumu: Looking to the Source

The phrase associated with the Honolulu presentation, “Nānā i ke kumu,” translates directly as “Look to the source.” It presents a seductive fit for an exhibition about materials It stands in close association with the work of Mary Kawena Pukui, the towering Hawaiian scholar, educator, composer and cultural authority whose documentation helped sustain Hawaiian language, history and knowledge. Nānā i ke Kumu is also the title of a foundational source work on Hawaiian life and practice, mirroring how Hermès petit h finds its own creative origins in repurposed materials.

To look to the source, then, is not merely to inspect a leather offcut’s résumé. It is to turn toward origins, teachers, ancestral knowledge and the foundations from which understanding grows. The phrase belongs first beside Marzan’s relationship to his great-grandmother, his teachers, Bishop Museum and the transmission of ʻike kūpuna. Only after respecting that lineage can one consider its lighter resonance with petit h’s attention to the histories embedded in materials.

There is still something provocative in that resonance.Contemporary luxury has trained consumers to worship pristine newness. Meanwhile, petit h makes a case for interruption, irregularity and second thoughts.Yet it would be foolish to declare the project “zero waste”. It is equally a stretch to pretend one inventive workshop renders a global luxury house circular. De Virieu describes the impulse more convincingly as artisanal common sense. Good materials deserve attention, and skilled hands use them carefully. Ultimately, value does not evaporate simply because an object has missed its first appointment.

The Installation and Language of Objects

Marzan’s colorful geometric paper panels will surround the objects in Honolulu, not as decorative scenery but as the visual argument holding the room together. Within them, the banana pouf may raise a smile, the horse shelf may perform its balancing act and the basket may continue its late-life skateboarding career. Their humor is genuine, but so is the discipline underneath it. Every joke lands because a craftsperson has solved the construction.

Back in Pantin, what stayed with me was not simply the surprise of what the materials had become. It was the attention they had received before becoming anything at all. Someone had paused, looked again and resisted the efficient conclusion that their usefulness was over. In Honolulu, that act of looking will enter a deeper conversation about source, memory and cultural continuity. Objects, like people, are often far more compelling after surviving a change of plans. The clever ones remember where they came from.

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